August 21, 2013 - IBM today announced the industry's first integrated enterprise risk management solution that helps financial services clients maximize profitability, ease compliance and boost risk- aware decision making.
The new IBM Signature Solution – risk management for credit lifecycle management enables the CFO to drive an integrated approach to monitor the credit exposure across an organization. The solution features a dashboard that provides visibility into the wholesale credit touchpoints that extend from the front office to the back office.
In today's economy, CFOs are challenged with making strategic decisions with trusted data located in disparate areas of the organization -- using data sets both from inside and outside the company. They are managing people, systems and technology infrastructure in a time of great regulatory scrutiny. And at the baseline, CFOs are serving as corporate scorekeepers, ensuring all risk and accounting functions are accurately reported.
"CFO's are now acting as agents to identify new growth opportunities, and manage strategic shifts in their companies' business models. To help with this shift, companies are rethinking their use of data and analytics to get a more holistic view of their portfolio, and to get a single view of their customers and related risk exposures" said Wayne Wilczynski, Global Risk and Regulatory Compliance Leader, IBM. "IBM's new solution can provide insights to improve credit risk decisions and significantly advance an instrumented integrated view for CFO's."
Despite increased productivity in the face of regulatory pressures, some financial organizations are still relying on siloed and manual wholesale credit systems and processes to fulfill risk management responsibilities. These processes do not provide financial management with the integrated, timely information they need to proactively manage risk and optimize capital.
Visualizing the Bigger Picture
Achieving enterprise risk management for wholesale credit requires that firms with isolated credit risk solutions move to an integrated system built on a consistent data infrastructure. Increasingly, as enterprise risk is being managed across a team of C-suite executives including the CFO, CRO and COO, businesses are showing increased demand for technologies that provide an aligned view of risk.
The new IBM Signature Solution provides a single view of customer and credit exposures that increases visibility and access to consistent information, providing management with the information they need, in a way that can be easily understood, on a timely basis. By aggregating and analyzing credit data from dozens of sources, the technology helps clients to improve customer profitability manage risk of loss, and have a better view into key capital management decisions.
IBM helped a major bank unify its credit risk exposure strategy for their wholesale lines of business with this new solution. Prior to installing the IBM solution, the management of credit risk was extremely difficult, often requiring four to five business days to aggregate more than 150 systems for a single entity. The complex process produced information and reporting challenges which comprised the accuracy of risk reporting.
With the global deployment of the IBM solution, the bank has empowered over 1,000 users across multiple processing centers to have a unified view into the bank's credit risk management data. The visibility to consistent information resulted in a dramatic error reduction and correction, while significantly improving the accuracy of capital projections and management of customer profitability. Risk management owners can now see the entire risk associated with a customer/counter-party at the "push of a button." Information that would take one week to produce before can now be generated daily.
IBM also helped a major payments company to replace a homegrown system with a flexible and scalable enterprise risk solution. After installing the IBM solution, the payments company can more accurately measure and report on credit exposure. The solution serves as a single repository for industry and client information.
IBM has been named a leader in delivering risk and compliance solutions within a new IDC Marketscape 2013 Vendor Analysis report. According to a report issued on August 16, IBM is recognized as a leader for its ability to combine leading software products and business consulting services together to drive enterprise risk management solutions. This is deemed to be a unique point of differentiation in the marketplace.
This solution draws upon IBM's decades of experience in helping clients address key industry challenges by delivering services that range from strategy development to solution implementation. IBM Signature Solutions provide clients with end-to-end support that includes change management, data integration and software implementation. The IBM Signature Solution – risk management features advanced software, powerful hardware, a Big Data platform, as well as access to leading risk experts and business analytics and optimization services.
The IBM Signature solution-risk management can provide C-suite decision-makers with a consolidated view of a company's credit activities to provide more control over the paths to risk adjusted profitability within a business. The solution helps to evolve risk management into a strategic function within an organization for differentiation and competitive advantage.
