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Creating Synergies: Market and Integration Know-how Combined with 20 Years' Experience in Financial Software for Banks
This year’s Consultants' Conference once again showed that FERNBACH’s software solutions are engineered to meet current and future banking requirements for regulatory compliance, risk management and lending processes. With an overwhelming response, the second FERNBACH Consultants’ Conference took place at the end of October 2009 in Frankfurt/Main and brought together representatives from leading consulting and services companies who could envisage applying FERNBACH’s FlexFinance solutions in their projects.
Greater Cooperation between FERNBACH and Partners Pays Off
Ulrich Brunett, Country Manager at FERNBACH, got the conference rolling with a presentation on the objectives and approaches for greater cooperation between FERNBACH and partners. He addressed the measures that allow FERNBACH to adjust its solutions quickly and efficiently to meet national and international requirements. This requires an active exchange of information with consultants on changing market conditions.
With FlexFinance Analytix and FlexFinance Lending, FERNBACH has developed application environments that, with support from consultants, enhance targeted implementation for customers.
Mr Brunett went on to illustrate the advantages of FlexFinance components that incorporate all the functionalities relevant to regulatory compliance and risk management based on an integrated data model. The combination of applications for bank management and for risk management based on a uniform data model was considered by consultants as one of FERNBACH’s key areas of competence.
Then FERNBACH experts hosted two workshops:one on ‘Liquidity Risk with FlexFinance Analytix’ and another on ‘FlexFinance Lending’. The objective of the workshops was to work out possible ways for FERNBACH and consultants to cooperate in the banking industry.
Workshop: Liquidity Risk with FlexFinance Analytix
Liquidity Risk Management in View of Regulatory Requirements
The speaker, Dr Jörg Drüen, Product Manager at FERNBACH, addressed the topic of liquidity management in terms of regulatory requirements in his workshop, beginning with an outline of the legal standards that banks have to observe.
Detecting and Combating Liquidity Risks at an Early Stage
He presented FERNBACH's Liquidity solution, explaining how the standard software covers regulatory requirements. Apart from a forecast of the future liquidity situation and determination of possible liquidity squeezes, this liquidity application also comprises functions for generating scenarios and for counterbalancing capacity.
This is the only type of strategy that allows banks to detect liquidity risks at an early stage and combat them adequately. Dr Drüen focussed in particular on scenario-based analyses, caused by changes in consumer behaviour or market rate changes, modelling of insolvency among large borrowers or deterioration of an entire portfolio. He also used a number of detailed graphics to show how these individual scenarios can be combined for the analysis of macroeconomic meta-scenarios. This simulation should be analysed to determine the effects on the future liquidity situation of a bank as well as on its counterbalancing capacity. FlexFinance Liquidity makes it possible to pinpoint the liquidity situation for an exact date and counterbalancing capacity to be determined up to the expiry of all current deals.
Enhancing Existing Analyses – a Quick and Easy Solution
FlexFinance Analytix, from the FlexFinance range, is a streamlined, versatile tool for sophisticated modelling and for enhancing existing analyses. Implementation of the most recent FSA requirements was demonstrated using examples of real bank data. Workshop participants were most impressed by the fact that this solution can be used for complex and data-intensive scenarios and that all banking requirements are covered.
An animated discussion on the subject matter and the workshop results then followed, during which it became apparent that requirements differ from bank to bank. An approach that provides a ‘neutral’ analysis platform on which individual banking models and customer-specific reports can be generated is therefore the right strategy. As far as the challenge of data integration is concerned, a software solution should, in terms of quality and quantity, be able to process complex data centrally while fulfilling the cash flow requirements for generating complex products.
The final discussion again highlighted the fact that FlexFinance Analytix supports the integration and aggregation of cash flow and transaction data from different systems in one company.
Workshop: FlexFinance Lending
FlexFinance Lending Inspires Consultants
In the FlexFinance Lending workshop, FERNBACH’s experts Wolfgang Miller, Head of Business Consulting Lending, and Jürgen Späder, Chief Technology Officer Lending, illustrated the structure of the lending application from a business and technical perspective. Together with the participants, they worked out possibilities for FERNBACH to cooperate with consultants on lending projects. They determined how consultants could implement FlexFinance Lending in current and future projects and what their contributions could be before, during and after a lending project. The workshop’s speakers explained the basic idea for developing efficient solution applications based on a modular structure.
Future Investment
The advantages of the new FERNBACH approach are obvious. The modular structure and component features provide an ideal basis for customised enhancements for banks. Customer investments are made more secure because banks can react more efficiently, implement market and regulatory requirements more quickly and introduce products more flexibly to the market.
Consulting Companies Back FlexFinance Lending
The speakers demonstrated how relevant applications can be assembled using workflows for different business sectors for both private and corporate customers. Here, the tasks in customer projects that consultants could carry out were highlighted. Solution creation and business process reengineering proved to be the processes that involved intensive consulting while support during the project implementation phase as well as maintenance services also continue to be relevant.
FERNBACH’s strategy met with a very positive response from the consultants, who assessed it as ‘a useful and open approach’. FERNBACH’s Lending solution and its performance greatly impressed the participants and the company’s implementation method also met with great interest.
Summary of the Conference
- FERNBACH intensifies its commitment with and for the consultants
- FERNBACH develops products that make it possible for consultants to be directly involved in project implementation
- FERNBACH agreed to collaborate on FlexFinance Analytix with two consultants at the conference with actual project approaches available
- We would like to ask our customers to make use of their contacts with the consultants in order to work with us to evaluate new solution approaches
