Can CRD-IV Compliance Be Made Into A Process?

Can I ask how you are coping with all things CRD-IV reporting? The reason I ask is that, as you will know, SynApps has recently moved into this market.

What sort of a market is it? It’s one tied to the twin themes of compliance and deadlines. As anyone in the European financial services sector will know – the EBA, the European Banking Agency, is pressing for a uniform reporting structure to help it better track banks’ underlying financial strength. In practical terms, that means you complying with its strict requirements in terms of filing your financial records in the database language of XBRL.

That’s the compliance side. The deadline side is just as important. As it stands, the deadline that is mostly affecting you is likely to be that of FINREP which is looming for the end of the year (November), with another, COREP , coming soon after. And if you are a financial services organisation, you have no choice but to give the Agency what it wants and in the form it wants, when required.

That’s the CRD (Capital Requirements Directive) (more accurately, CRD IV) system summarised. The question has to be, then, are you – as a financial organisation – set up to properly conform to these compliance structures – and meet those non-negotiable deadlines?

The chances are that if you aren’t looking to make the production of XBRL-format reports as slick as possible, you may struggle. After all, you’re going to need to do it in as consistent and as compliant a manner as you can.

That’s why we at SynApps have started talking about XBRL ‘as a service.’

Let’s dive down into that a bit more. As you may know, we’ve been working with a company that is 100% focused on the XBRL problem, a great UK firm called CoreFiling. What CoreFiling has done is to produce a way to allow you to accurately produce, and even more importantly validate, XBRL.

In one move, that offers you a lot of help in terms of meeting the CRD-IV requirements. What we are doing – working with our enterprise content management partner, EMC (with the Documentum platform) – is to make that process into an actual service.

Conformant

What do I mean by that? Well, with a piece of software called the ConXReporting tool, we use CoreFiling to validate the XBRL and add a complete environment around that to help you and your team complete the requisite CRD IV work – at such a level of automation that we think the term ‘service’ is entirely accurate.

How? Through templates that are fully conformant to the regulations, you can help team members quickly and comprehensively fill in what they need to. They can do this by the mechanisms they are used to/happy with, like Excel – as everything will be checked by the system and made consistent.

Which gets you the report completed quicker and more accurately. However, that’s not really enough, if you think about it. That’s because you also need to think about the workflow and the process. In each and every organisation needing to do FINREP, or COREP, etc., there will be identified individuals you need to push elements of this process out to. You also need reviewers to check and if necessary query what comes back, so as to make sure that what gets put in the central ‘pot’ for the final report makes sense.

It’s the production of that valid whole that we call the XBRL service.

We are going to take you from what is likely to be – if you have even got as far as properly preparing for this – a very manual, ad hoc effort to a smooth, safe and automated validation process that will offer you a way to implement a proper, auditable, internal process.

Now that I have given you a top-level view, in the next blog I will dive a bit more into what the specifics of the XBRL service is.

Thanks for your time – and good luck with CRD-IV!