Last time (‘Can CRD-IV Compliance Be Made Into A Process?‘) we looked at the implications for banks and financial services organisations resulting from new regulatory demands from the EBA the European Banking Agency.
The EBA has mandated that all reports filed to it going forward need to follow certain prescribed formatting rules, centred on the database language of XBRL– with the first real deadline being FINREP, for FINancial REPorting which you need to be set up for by no later than November.
More importantly: we started to talk about what you could do to prepare. You won’t be surprised to hear that vendors are scrambling to offer ‘solutions’ here. What you actually need, though, is more likely to be what we at SynApps solutions, working with our key partners of XBRL firm CoreFiling and main enterprise content management partner, EMC (with the Documentum platform) have brought to market: the production of EBA-conformant reports via the delivery of XBRL as a service.
We do that via our ConXReporting tool, which takes the correct XBRL that CoreFiling helped produce but as part of a more complete system that can help you build a transparent, reliable process for getting things like FINREP production right.
This is what I want to discuss a bit more today. What might we mean when we call this a service?
Do you have the time to do this any other way?
I think this is an efficient service for the following reasons:
Because it’s a cloud-delivered solution, there’s no time-lag or big up front investment needed on your organisation’s behalf. A lot of projects, even for vital work, get pushed back because of the issues of provisioning resource, setting up servers, assigning development resource. You don’t need to do that with ConXReporting – and to be honest, given it’s now Q2, I wonder if you would have the time anyway.
This is a real service that you can just plug in tomorrow and work with.
Secondly, there are features of the ConXReporting approach that are genuinely unique to it that the other solutions don’t have – which means you’d have to work on providing them. Take persistence. The vast majority of the other systems hold validations transiently – they don’t store them for future reference. That will almost certainly prove to be quite a hassle, as chances are the whole EBA system will change (it has done so far!) and things like the taxonomies will change. That means if the data is not there in three months time if you have to re-jig it, you’d have to go back and start over – which isn’t just a chore, it invites the same opportunity for manual error that you wanted to avoid by automating your XBRL work in the first place. ConXReporting offers you ways to re-apply and re-validate, which is a great back-stop should you need it. (Think of it like a tax return. Few people keep all the information after they finish; most of us file online and that’s it. FINREP is like doing the tax return every two months – so you would want to keep the data and only update as needed, surely?)
Risk management
Persistence – keeping the information – is very useful then. But that’s not all. The workflow aspect of this is just as vital, our customers are telling us. Banks want to delegate EBA report work out and handle it as efficiently as they can internally. To do that, they want a process but also visibility. Who did this work? Where did that figure comes from, what were the bases used to derive it? What happens if you need to change resource allocation around? Our ‘XBRL as a service’ procedure is very good at helping your managers and administrators handle the HR and auditing/security side of FINREP (and soon, COREP and the rest). You are going to know, very quickly, who did what, when did they do it and why they did it – or be equipped with enough insight into the process to ask why.
To sum up: we genuinely are offering a service-led way of helping you manage the CRD IV report production process. That means from the efficiency, risk management and general peace of mind aspects, ConXReporting is going to be the way you want to get set for all this XBRL-based work, going forward.
Can I end by wishing you both an amazing summer – but also not too many headaches dealing with all things XBRL!