Services : Case Study : Risk Database

Company Profile

The company is an UK-based investment manager that has offices world-wide and handles thousands of transactions each day.

Project Brief

Prior to solution implementation the company stored risk information in ad-hoc spreadsheets and generated reports using Excel and Word. This process was time-consuming and often produced inconsistent reports, which failed to satisfy senior management or the external regulator.

The Risk Manager was under increasing pressure, not only to manage risk, but also to be seen to be managing and controlling risk, and needed a quick and flexible solution that could be customised to meet the developing needs of the company and the regulator.

Solution

• ROI within 3 months
• Information is always available, via a dashboard
• Accurate and consistent reports are produced automatically, on a weekly basis

Data was imported into the risk database from existing spreadsheets using the flexible import feature. Four initial reports were quickly developed for different audiences. These reports were run on a weekly basis for 6 weeks before changes were made to incorporate requests from management and other offices for additional and more detailed information. These changes were made by the client themselves in a few minutes and have been used on a weekly basis ever since.

The reports produced are consistent and contain charts and tables that make it much easier to identify risks, changes in risk and potential problems, costs and savings.

The reports are produced automatically, at pre-determined intervals, and published to specific locations on the internal network to make them immediately available to management.

The company initially used an external, managed service from Electrum while they prepared a server to host the Risk Database within their own network. Once the internal server was available, the data was seamlessly transferred from the external managed service to the internal server, with no loss of functionality or availability.

Outcome
The system has been in use for over 2 years, producing weekly reports for internal and external consumption. It has resulted in significant cost savings to the company and a return on investment within 3 months. The flexibility of the new system means that new reports, such as HTML reports for the customer’s intranet, have been added at no additional cost.