ibs news: us round-up


IBS Journal September 2015


BB&T creates centralised finance and reporting system


BB&T is replacing its ageing infrastructure with a new consolidated financial and reporting system. The new architecture will allow access


to a single source of accurate data. This development is part of the US-based bank’s ‘Finance Transformation’ project. Started in 2012, the overhaul has seen new systems for general ledger, liquidity risk, and plan- ning and forecasting. BB&T’s corporate controller, Cindy


Powell, says the project is driven by the need for change following the credit crisis. The bank noticed an increasing number of information requests from regulators and its own management team. ‘Everybody wanted more granularity


and more visibility into the data and they wanted it quickly,’ Powell says. ‘They wanted to be able to aggregate the data and they wanted to be able to correlate all the risk and then see what the data was telling us.’ The bank’s finance and risk system


included a 40-year-old mainframe for its gen- eral ledger system, which was ripe for mod- ernisation. Powell says ‘it crunched the trans- actions just fine but didn’t have that level of visibility to take us to the next step’. In a scenario where someone needed


to know if an interest-only loan was going to convert into an amortising loan, Powell explained that the person would have to use multiple loan systems to access that data. Because of this laborious method, she says the bank realised it needed to design a plat- form to integrate the finance and risk data into one source, ‘ultimately providing one source of the truth’ for all its reporting. BB&T’s CTO, Gary Coleman, outlines the


technological developments since the pro- ject started, and the bank’s future plans. In May 2014 it implemented sub-ledgers,


payables and tax. In November it had its tech- nical ‘go-live’. ‘It really was the beginning of a very rigor-


ous, paralleling and testing activity – and mak- ing sure everything was right,’ says Coleman. Some of the new architecture is very


recent. March saw the implementation of plan- ning and forecasting, while liquidity ‘phase 1’ was introduced in April. Both of which were rolled out on SAP’s Hana platform. During a twelve-month period the


28 © IBS Intelligence 2015


BB&T Tower, Atlanta © www.seniorliving.com


bank had five successful consecutive ‘go-lives’ and it ran six months of produc- tion dailies – which Coleman says ‘was a big deal as we were doing this for an extremely long period of time’. He adds: ‘Our executive management


said if you don’t have your GL right, you really have nothing [and] that drove a lot of the testing activity.’ In terms of the number of actual user


issues across its 18,000 users, the corpo- ration reported 476 of them in three legal month-end cycles and two forecast cycles in SAP’s BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPS) solution.


Coleman says there were also internal


and external auditors who checked over the systems and signed off on the capabilities. tHe believes the bank’s ‘best days are ahead’. The bank did a presentation on its trans-


formation journey so far at the Sapphire con- ference in Orlando, Florida earlier this year. BB&T is one of the key players in the US financial services market, with assets of $189.2 billion and market capitalisation of $28.2 billion (as of March 2015). It has a net- work of 1875 locations across twelve states and the country’s capital, Washington DC. Its HQ is in North Carolina.


Antony Peyton IN BRIEF


Citizens State Bank of Lankin, a small family-owned entity in North Dakota, has selected IBT as its new core banking software provider. The bank will implement the vendor’s i2Core platform. Greg Bauer, the bank’s president, comments that its owners – the Vorachek family –


‘continue to move the bank forward to the digital generation with a new technology system capable of moving forward with them’. He adds that the bank’s team was ‘extremely impressed’ with the i2Core demonstration done by IBT. Citizens State Bank’s IT lead, Christine Grove, emphasises that the IT set-up had


to change to keep up with the digital banking demands. ‘To retain the customers we have and their children in the future we have to stay on top of current technology.’ IBT is a Texas-based provider of banking software to small and medium-sized banks


and credit unions. Its customers include First Bank and Peoples Independent Bank in Alabama, Merchant and Farmers Bank in Louisiana, Peoples National Bank in Ohio, Dillon Credit Union in Kansas and the First National Bank of Eagle Lake in Texas. —Tanya Andreasyan


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