Indo Zambia Bank (IZB) is a leading financial services provider in Zambia, providing retail banking services to the communities it serves. The bank was founded in on 19 October 1984 by the Government of Zambia, and three state owned Indian banks Bank of Baroda, Bank of India and Central Bank of India IZB was using Microsoft excel for all its ALM needs but the excel based process and reporting was not sufficient to meet their management and regulatory requirements, thus IZB sought to implement an integrated ALM solution. As part of the selection process multiple ALM solutions were evaluated and BALM, Surya’s ALM solution, was shortlisted by IZB for implementation.
The Problems:
- Bank didn’t have a system in place for ALM and all the reports were generated using excel by collecting data from various source systems manually. Since it was done manually there were quite a number of challenges, like:
- Collection of source data from CBS and treasury system to analysis risk and identifying maturity profile to bucket source data
- Time taken to compile data and generate regulatory & other management reporting was very high
- It was not possible to prepare requisite Gap Reports on daily basis
- ‘What if’ scenarios could not be modelled
- As most of the reports were being prepared manually, there was a high possibility of human error, and the time taken to generate these reports was unduly long.
- All these challenges and problems made monitoring liquidity and interest rate risk an up-hill task.
Solution Proposed Surya’s proposed to implement its Bank Asset and Liability Management (BALM) application, a comprehensive solution which addresses both regulatory & management reporting requirements. The solution is highly parametrized & has host of features like:
KEY DIFFERENTIATORS
DATA HARMONIZER
At the core of BALM solution is the Data Harmonizer platform, which provides the key handshake with external host systems. Data Harmonizer ensures data extraction, reconciliation, cash flow generation, dynamic data addition for scenario creation & finally the aggregation.
IMPLEMENTATION APPROACH
Surya’s customer centric approach and agile implementation methodology ensured successful delivery and resulted in project go-live a month ahead of schedule. The entire implementation team had good knowledge of domain and business requirements.
- Surya ALM Suite addressed both regulatory & management reporting requirements. The solution being highly parametrized and with host of friendly features like ratio builder, which enabled users to create their own control mechanisms, analysis etc.
- Surya’s Data Harmonizer Platform being extremely fast engine reduced the processing time dramatically while running on commodity hardware. This enabled the bank to submit reports to regulators on T+1 basis while bringing down the total project spends.
- Automation of MIS reports for both management and statutory reporting
- Entire interface processing from data generation is automated to run daily. Entire data processing interface processing takes less than an hour.
- Surya’s products being shipped with a Run Control system that makes running batch jobs very easy. This has helped reduce IT involvement, while maintaining a high quality of service to users.
- Tools are delivered to users for the reconciliation of BALM report values with source system.
