How one financial cooperative with 0% risk appetite finally discovered the joys of digital transformation.
In the Netherlands, a cooperative bank with almost 90 branches wanted to elevate their regulatory reconciliations to bring them in line with self-imposed high standards.
Their existing legacy technology was unable to cope with the complexity and scope of their regulatory data, and Rabobank has zero appetite for regulatory risk. They needed a flexible solution that would enable them to build regulatory reconciliations (recs) quickly and identify breaks more accurately, within a short deadline to improve their MIFID reconciliations.
Finding the source of breaks was virtually impossible with existing systems, because they reconciled on a trade level rather than a field level. What were they to do?
Meeting regulatory challenges with agility
Said the bank’sHead (Operations Control & Services), Joyce Verschaeren: “Existing systems just told you that there was a break, not where exactly. So you had to go back and investigate to find the source: we had to run a reconciliation within a reconciliation. We needed an intuitive and fast-learning system that could deliver all we needed, and if we wanted a solution that could be set up in a short period of time, we needed to be daring.”
After partnering with a reconciliation solutions vendor to replace its legacy infrastructure, Rabobank is now able to run reconciliations with over 60 fields and see exactly where breaks are occurring.
At the outset, the bank was able to get up and running with the digital transformation quickly, onboarding eight highly complex regulatory reconciliations three times faster than the industry average. According to Verschaeren: “The fact the platform is data agnostic is good, but what’s even better is the output. Lots of systems are data agnostic but the output isn’t clear.”
Also, because the bank’s team though thought their old recs were so complex, they wanted the solutions vendor to do the first few to learn the process. However, digitalization meant that things were easier to set up and master compared to legacy solutions.
“With Duco we were finally able to reach the high level of quality we strived for in regulatory reconciliations,” Verschaeren concluded, alluding to the rec solutions provider chosen by the bank.
Cutting regulatory risk further
With the digital transformation of their rec processes, the bank is already saving hundreds of hours in investigation time regularly.
This successful start has encourage Rabobank to increase the use of the data integrity solution further, by ramping up the migration of reconciliations from their legacy system to Duco.
They also have an in-house solution, as well as a small number of manual processes, that they are looking to replace. “We don’t want to have too many different tools,” explained Verschaeren.
