In our previous blog, (‘The Beginner’s Guide To CRD IV Reporting – And Why Banks Need To Pay Attention’) we examined the detail of these new, mandated structures that financial services firms have to comply with to meet European banking reporting requirements. We discussed CoreFiling and its technology contribution. Now, we need to discuss what EMC and SynApps are offering this market.

So where does Enterprise Content Management come in? What we have done, as experts in ECM, is to integrate the XBRL processing engine from CoreFiling, our partner, with a state of the art business process management engine from our partner EMC which allows you to move information between different people to work with and collate and enter data. Finally, we are utilising ConXReporting technology which gives you the taxonomy and associated templates in the form of workbooks, managed in an enterprise document and records management environment.

ConXReporting allows us to generate the right output for all the various CRD IV formats, COREP (Common Reporting), LC (liquid coverage), FINREP (Financial Reporting) and Large Exposures and Stable Funding Ratio. This means you as a bank can now jump straight from data to report templates specific to your organisation, and based on a taxonomy which has been mandated by the European Banking Authority. For each of those report types, we can create reports that are specific to your organisation. We also provide security so that only the appropriate people will ever see those reports. As well as the compliance in ensuring that the reports are retained for the appropriate duration.  

We are used to working with big, complex document-based systems – it’s what we do! Here the emphasis is in particular on workflow. We also define a review and approval cycle so when Q1 2015 comes along and you have to create a COREP report, you can press a button that will then set off a business process defined for that template. All of the version and audit trail functionality that is within the underlying document management system is so great it just kicks into play, thus helping the team member do the job safely and efficiently.

One of the key things that happens here – which is over and above what you would get from regular ECM – is that CoreFiling converts your workbook to XBRL, validates it against the taxonomy and either approves it or sends back the information for the author to clean up and re-submit.

When the XBRL in that particular form has been validated and all the forms have been completed, they are merged into one report which then goes off to a different team who have access to the entire report, for final validation. Once that is done, the report is locked down and made available to the relevant regulatory body.

To sum up: you don’t have to edit XBRL and you get a full audit history of the review and approval cycle, so you always know who and when it was completed and signed off, and we will maintain this information for the regulatory number of years. You also have access to historical reports, should they be needed, so everyone (including your auditors) can see what has previously been submitted.

This is a very compelling set of features that is going to help financial institutions meet not just the first but all of their CRD IV deadlines, and in a very efficient, pain-free way.

That’s a lot of detail, but I hope we have got to the heart of what we are offering with our financial reporting functionality.