solutions prior to the acquisition by Wolters Kluwer. In 2008, FRSGlobal gained a foothold in the Russian
market through a deal with BNP Paribas Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) group. The supplier was to tailor FinancialAnalytics to cover reporting to the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) and the global reporting functionality at Moscow-based BNP Paribas ZAO. According to Rebecca Bond, at this time global director of marketing at FRSGlobal, the bank’s four-month evaluation included a number of Russian providers. FRS Global already had its eyes on the Russian market. ‘The work started many months before, with a series of workshops to measure the complexity of the Russian regulatory reporting,’ she said. A local partner was identified to help with the push. With this signing, Russia became the tenth BNP country
operation to take FinancialAnalytics after Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Poland, Portugal and the Netherlands, where the system was already up and running, and Greece and Spain, where it would be rolled out in 2009 and 2010. Other entities of the group also used reporting software from FRSGlobal, including BNP Paribas Private Banking and BNP Paribas Securities Services.
Another notable signing came in early 2009 from
Skandinavisk Data Centre (SDC), a Denmark-based IT provider to over 130 banks in the Nordic region, which was to implement the stress testing component of RiskPro in all of its member banks. During the course of six months, FRSGlobal held three workshops with SDC and its major customers. The first workshop was a general one, followed by an ALM themed session. The closing workshop was prepared by FRSGlobal, but executed by SDC itself, and was focused on stress testing and liquidity risk. All sessions were based on ‘the real data supplied by one of the SDC’s banks’, said Kris Luyten, account manager at FRSGlobal. ‘It wasn’t just an academic exercise. The participants could really see what RiskPro could produce based on actual data.
‘Our main competition was an in-house development,’ he continued. ‘A number of SDC’s customers have already been producing stress testing reports by themselves for a year or so, mainly Excel-based. Some of the bigger banks also had front office systems with such capabilities.’ In his view, the main reason for choosing FRSGlobal’s offering was that it enabled the banks to integrate risk and regulatory reporting, as SDC and its member banks had been using RiskPro for credit and market risk capital adequacy (CAD) reporting since 2004. In 2009, Zurich-based EFG International began the implementation of RegPro across all of its international locations. The group had been using Fire in Hong Kong, Singapore, Monaco and Luxembourg. In the Asia Pacific sites, the new solution was to be implemented ‘to update regulatory reporting in line with latest requirements’, said Mark Bagnall, head of IT at EFG. Luxembourg and Monaco upgraded to RegPro the previous year due to the Basel II requirements. RegPro was also to be deployed at one of the group’s start-ups,
in France. It is clear from just these three examples that, broadly speaking, FRSGlobal had a diverse customer base which provided repeat business. However, the vendor did not have everything its own way and its fiercest competitor was probably Financial Architects. There were also regional competitors. For instance, Bank of India, which used FRSGlobal worldwide, opted to replace it in the US with a more local solution, Sofgen’s REG-Reporter.
Financial Studio (FinStudio)
Founded in Belgium in 1997, Finnacial Architects (FinArch) achieved
considerable success with Financial Studio
(FinStudio), its comprehensive financial management suite. It was set up by Dirk de Beule (ex-FRS) and Chris Puype (ex-ABN Amro). ABN Amro was the first customer and FinArch swiftly came to compete with FRS, among others. It remained a private company for a long while and established offices across the globe, with its success based on a single Microsoft-based platform that was extended to meet regulatory, accounting and business reporting requirements over its 15+ years. Marketed as a fully integrated finance resource planning (FRP) solution for banks and other financial institutions, FinStudio was intended to provide the tools needed to manage, measure, and report all financial activities, including IAS/IFRS and multi-GAAP accounting, Basel II and Basel III, management and central bank reporting (for the latter, it now supports 20+ countries), risk and liquidity management, and others forms of compliance. It was claimed that the solution’s modular approach provided flexibility, scalability, and the power to connect to all existing data sources. FinStudio spanned both compliance and accounting, and could constitute a full sub-ledger in the latter domain. Moves within some banks to bring together these disciplines had played to its strengths. A suite of generic modules underpinning the FinStudio FRP
solution comprised an industry standard data model; multi- dimensional reporting hierarchies; archiving tools; full audit trail and historical information management; and rules-based engines. FinArch claimed that the single platform approach meant it was a small step for users that had FinStudio for Basel II to support Basel III, with 95 per cent of the data the same, in contrast to the position faced by users of some competitor products. It had ridden the wave of heightened regulation, as well as the demand for better internal reporting and management, particularly around liquidity. The product’s features were deliverable via web
technology, where an intranet portal solution enabled the distribution and exchange of financial information across the enterprise. Financial reports were delivered through standard web browsers, and could be distributed in various formats. The solution was thin client-based, had an SQL relational database, was based on open standards, and utilised OLAP
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