Capital Markets Reporting Process Optimization

The Challenge

A leading Canadian Financial Institution (FI) reported their capital markets trading data to a regulatory body according to Basel III reporting guidelines on a monthly basis.

Through the use of legacy systems and excessive manual intervention, their reporting process was cumbersome and had a large margin of error (±25%). The lengthy cycle time led to two separate reporting days (soft close and hard close), while the inaccurate data provided a poor representation of the FI’s true risk exposure to the regulatory body.

The FI engaged the Carly Rian Group to assess the current state capital markets reporting process and develop solutions to optimize the end-to-end flow and reduce the overall duration while improving data quality.

The Approach

• Conducted interviews and workshops across all 19 trading desks to uncover key insights
• Executed data collection plan to develop detailed process documentation and identify and measure top areas of non-value-added time
• Analyzed securities’ raw data sources to determine the root causes for the poor data quality issues and major reporting gaps
• Evaluated the data transformation process through legacy systems and manual intervention from the raw data sources to the reporting layer to determine key data processing pain points
• Created a strategic roadmap through multiple iterations of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which detailed incremental releases that provide continued benefits to key stakeholders

The Outcome

• Eliminated the need to perform manual reconciliation through the retirement of legacy systems and the progression to a central data repository
• Improved data quality to ±5% through the elimination of all data gaps and automated data reporting
• Phased out the need to perform the data reporting process twice monthly to support both the soft close and hard close