Customers

Credit Suisse

"Business Objects, BearingPoint, and Credit Suisse partnered to provide high volume, scalable operational risk reporting for our controllers to meet new banking regulations."

Melanie Grob
Reporting Lead, Operational Risk IT
Credit Suisse

Challenge

Credit Suisse is a leading financial services company, headquartered in Zurich. It is focused on serving its clients with investment banking, private banking, and asset management services since 1856. Credit Suisse provides companies, institutional clients, and high net worth clients as well as retail clients with innovative products and advisory solutions. A reorganization united the private bank and investment bank under one brand in the marketplace, which led to changes in processes and requirements for meeting new operational risk regulations.

In the past, for operational risk the private bank of Credit Suisse had used a paper-intensive process that would not scale when merged with higher-volume, lower-value transaction businesses. Therefore, the bank undertook to replace its financial operational risk self-assessment and reporting systems with a new automated data-intensive system suitable for enlarged volumes and intensive reporting requirements. Banking regulations demand that each account owner access and document the financial operational risks to their business in a self-assessment form, validate the account exposures, and confirm with a digital signature that they agree with the assessment.

Approach

After evaluating the marketplace for operational risk self-assessment solutions, Credit Suisse decided to write an in-house system to its own specifications and integrate BusinessObjects XI Release 2 from Business Objects, an SAP company, to create summary reports. Managers can log on to the system in a secure environment to view their account exposures and risks, and make approvals via the click of a mouse. Information is recorded and written back to the database and summary reports are generated on the many thousand self-assessments due or completed. In addition, Credit Suisse created a management information platform for controllers to generate ad hoc queries and analysis on the self-assessment data in an easy to use, flexible way. The BusinessObjects XI platform is also used to generate credit risk large exposure reports for the Swiss Federal Banking Commission (SFBC or EBK) and private bank custody reporting.

Grob says, "Business Objects, BearingPoint, and Credit Suisse partnered to provide high volume, scalable operational risk reporting for our controllers to meet new banking regulations.

"We chose BearingPoint especially because of its end-to-end skills: Having business analysis, universe, and report design as well as infrastructure and security setup performed by the same partner clearly reduced the complexity of the project and increased the quality of our deliverables. BearingPoint helped us to provide the required functionality on time and budget," says Grob.

Along with BusinessObjects XI Release 2, Credit Suite uses BusinessObjects Web Intelligence® for query and reporting, and BusinessObjects Dashboard Builder for creating executive dashboards. Grob says, "We needed a solution that could provide Web-based access 24x7 that combined reporting, ad hoc queries, and dashboards on one platform in a secure way—and at the same time, empowering controllers to access information in an easy to use, intuitive way."

To get all it needed, Credit Suisse chose BusinessObjects XI Release 2 to allow hundreds of users to access information critical to their business. Rollout of the solution started in Switzerland then moved to other European countries, followed by the United States and Singapore. It is envisaged the solution will have up to 3.500 users throughout the Credit Suisse organization. The company intends to extend the application with key risk indicator dashboards and visualization capabilities together with additional functionality for operational risk management.

Results

Since updating its operational risk and BI deployment, Credit Suisse has achieved significant benefits. Not only has it improved automation of a paper-intensive process, leading to cost savings, it has improved access to critical operational risk information—empowering controllers to make better business decisions. Controllers can get reports in minutes and create summary views for presentation to management. Executives receive reports and overviews of the key risks and exposures to the business and can drill down and view critical exposures to the business.

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