RM Applications: Bespoke Solution Provider to Financial Institutions Using Advanced Technologies

Powered by technological advancements, the banking industry is evolving at a rapid pace. For banks, it is no longer about managing or enhancing ‘As Is’ solution, infrastructure, or applications. Instead, they need to venture into new technologies such as big data, blockchain, data modeling, innovative payment models, and more. Banks are exploring data lakes and usage of big data for data management and analytics by processing structured and unstructured data to ascertain quantitative as well as qualitative aspects. Similarly, the financial industry is looking at data modeling techniques such as ‘R’ and ‘Python’ for crunching the data and building up data models especially in the area of credit risk, liquidity, basel and regulatory reporting such as MFRS9. Blockchain is another technology that will prove to be beneficial in the field of payments, remittances, and digital wallets.

At this point, banks need to develop bespoke solutions using the advanced and latest technology in the area of data management, remittance, and payments (such as QR driven) and analytical reporting with a flexible financial business model to minimize the high capital expenditures. As an MSC Status boutique software company based out of Kuala Lumpur, RM Applications develops bespoke solutions incorporating new technologies, new ideas and new ways of thinking to serve customer needs effectively in digital payments, data management, and analytics landscape. The company’s niche lies in remittance and payment, data management, analytics, and regulatory reporting while focusing on bespoke solutions in the areas of domestic and cross border payments and bespoke datamart development. These solutions addresss pecific pain points, requirements, and seamless integration, which at times cannot be addressed through off the shelf solutions. RMA also works in collaboration with leading solution providers, i.e., Localization and integration of Partners’ Solutions such as Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS), MongoDB, and Unscramble. “Rather than reinventing the wheel, we believe in collaborating with leading technology solution providers to serve our clients better and meet their expectations,” says Lokesh Gupta, co-founder of the company.

RMA enables end-to-end automation of remittance and payment through its OmniRemit, remittance solution suite that is tailor-made for financial institutions. As an “All in One Platform,” the solution suite supports mobile and online remittance, branch and agent remittance, remittance back office solutions and are in compliance with Bank Negara Malaysia requirements and AMLA (Anti Money Laundering) and KYC guidelines. “We have observed that most remittance or money change providers use separate systems for customer data storage, regulatory compliance, regulatory reporting, risk scoring, user logins that are not integrated,” explains Gupta. OmniRemit, on the other hand, offers all functions under a single platform, and customer data can be used across modules for transactions, risk scoring, customer profiling, and more.

Recently, the company has added money changing module to the suite to make it a full-fledged solution. The solution bypasses the conventional method of using SWIFT or other payment network and provides direct integration with a pre-designated overseas counterpart for processing payment using webservices.

The company follows a 360-degree customer-centric approach to meet the dynamic and evolving business model and requirement of the remittance industry. The solution is MoneyGram ready and supports straight-through processing and real-time interface with cross border remittance corridors for transaction processing In addition to OmniRemit, RMA has been focusing on bespoke solutions to meet the client’s regulatory reporting requirements that the current enterprise data warehouse solutions are unable to provide. Understanding the painpoints of lack of standardization of data values from different enterprise systems, data quality challenges, minimal transformation at the data warehouse, RMA develops bespoke data marts for ALM, FTP, IFRS9 & LCR reporting using OmniData framework, which is fast and deliver more value by serving the clients specific requirements. These data marts make the semi-processed data available, which can be fed into the risk and regulatory reporting engine to generate the reports and for analytics. RMA then develops customized reporting dashboards and an alerting solution called OmniReports for various business verticals largely in the area of compliance such as Basel 3 Liquidity, AMLA, CRS (Common Reporting Standards), regulatory and management reporting.

RMA has served numerous clients over the years. One of them is a leading Regional Malaysian Bank with subsidiaries spread across South East Asia. The bank’s aim was to streamline data management moving away from silo-based architecture to a more integrated environment at HQ level and across entities requiring a flexible data management solution to meet their vision of centralized ‘Liquidity Risk Hub.’ With RMA, the bank followed a structured data management approach to source data from multiple systems and eliminated discrepancies with proper exception handling to ensure data integrity. In addition, data hubbing concept was practiced to merge data from all entities (Masked / Unmasked based on Regulatory Guidelines) and load into centralized data for consolidated LCR / NSFR reporting. The solutioning was done with a view to consolidate the calculation and reporting of Basel III from a single, centralized (Consolidated for BNM) and decentralized (Each Entity Specific) reporting platform. RMA carefully designed the data management approach keeping in mind the volume, multiple entity data, heterogeneous source data file formats, data masking, filling of data gaps, aggregation along with proper integrity and reconciliation checks in place. Resultantly, the bank was able to successfully achieve integrated data management levels required under Basel III at Entity and HQ level with minimal human intervention. The bank is ready for the next phase of the roadmap to deploy advanced analytics to mine insights and drive efficiencies in management decisions.

With the goal of delivery customer-centric solutions, RMA continually updates its products based on customer’s feedback. The company will continue to expand both in terms of product offerings as well as geographical expansion. “We want to achieve a position where we are providing digital technology-driven solutions to move away from cash-based payments to digital payments using advanced hybrid technology with QR Based, blockchain and using digital assets as a method of processing remittance and payments,” says Gupta. On the other hand, RMA is expanding its clientele in Malaysia and also building its presence in regions such as Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, and Thailand.