Verisk Financial | Fintellix, a Verisk Business (NASDAQ:VRSK): Simplifying Regulatory Reporting

For banks and other non-depository lending institutions, reliable, complete, accurate, and timely data is critical for maintaining business operations, as well as meeting both financial and regulatory demands. This data dependency is especially true as individual banks prepare to comply with the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) new CECL accounting standard for calculating expected credit losses over the life of the financial instrument. CECL implementation poses numerous data management challenges because banks of all sizes and levels of sophistication will need to assess and—for many, upgrade—their existing data sourcing, storage, aggregation, modeling, and reporting capabilities.

CECL implementation will require a concerted effort by risk, finance, IT, and accounting policy departments to collate reliable data. By delivering risk, compliance management and analytical solutions for the financial services industry, Verisk Financial | Fintellix, a Verisk business (NASDAQ:VRSK) is assisting banks in handling larger volumes of data to forecast expected loss calculations, a sound implementation plan calls for a thorough review and enhancement of current data management capabilities.

With more than a decade of experience in solving complex risk and compliance issues in leading banks and financial services organizations across the world, Fintellix delivers an innovative Enterprise Data Management platform and proven industry expertise to help clients accelerate their growth. The company helps clients in master data management and regulatory reporting with a focus on critical business issues. Fintellix maximizes the value of data by transforming it into insightful information and analysis that assist clients in understanding their market contribution, managing, and mitigating risk while helping them stay ahead in the era of digitaltransformation. The company’s scalable and securely hosted solutions, help banks and financial institutions manage their portfolio, analytics, and data management requirements while ensuring readiness towards future compliance challenges.

Through its Glass Box Approach, the company pushes data to the reporting solution while the Fintellix configuration engine helps business users to map and configure conditions to a pre-defined reporting taxonomy, thereby eliminating the need to have the configurations defined and applied at each reporting line. The approach enables business users to have a consolidated view of all the business configurations at a single interface and once the configurations are set up, they only need to generate the reports and proceed with the submission process.

Data Assessment and Stress Testing

Primarily, Fintellix’s Glass Box Approach looks for an answer to a fundamental question: is the bank’s loan portfolio data ready to support regulatory needs for CECL, Stress Testing and Concentration Management? To this end, the company delivers Rapid Gap Analysis Process (R-GAP) which enables clients to fix their credit data today. A proven expert third-party credit data assessment service, R-GAP is a comprehensive review of the bank’s current credit portfolio data management procedures and tools. Further, Fintellix’s industry-leading Stress Testing approach meets or exceeds all regulatory expectations for stress testing.

Having been delivering industry-leading outsourced stress testing analysis and reporting to banks since 2008, Fintellix’s process and approach have been well received by state banking organizations, the OCC, FDIC, FFIEC, and State Bank Examiners. If a banking institution lacks the data and resources to perform bottom-up stress testing, the company’s top-down capital stress testing model provides a highly effective alternative to engage in industry-recognized stress testing best practices. Fintellix successfully links concentration analysis and stress scenarios based on local market credit conditions to create meaningful, actionable results for the bank.

Granular Data for Deeper Insight

What fuels Fintellix’s Glass Box Approach is the company’s data hub that has been designed to meet the needs of full-service banks and consistently uses universal banking business nomenclature across all its tables, metrics and attributes. The Data Hub is enrichedcontinuously to reflect evolution in the financial services industry, marked by the introduction of new products and regulatory standards. The Data Hub is designed to store data at the most granular level meeting the BCBS239 principles of completeness and adaptability. The system can be implemented on any database technology including HADOOP and is ideally suited for a Bank looking to organize its data assets aligned with the BCBS239 principles. Also, Fintellix also delivers an integrated and scalable banking data management infrastructure—The Fintellix Data Management Platform—which plugs into the multiple data sources and provisions this mass of raw data.

The platform can be used for a variety of downstream elements such as regulatory reporting, risk management, and business analytics. Built to connect to a variety of data sources, ranging from relational databases to unstructured information such as spreadsheets, the Fintellix Data Management Platform is optimized to work with the Fintellix Data Hub and can also be implemented on existing data infrastructure such as enterprise data warehouses.

The Fintellix Data Management Platform allows the Business users to enrich and augment the data as well as transform the data through business rules to enable the rapid consumption of the raw data into analytical and compliance applications. As the platform provides the data from the sources as-is to the down-stream applications, data once extracted can be reused for multiple purposes, driving down the cost and time for subsequent implementations, a concept called ‘SEMI – Single Extract, Multiple Implementations.’ The platform harnesses a host of features to ensure maximum flexibility and business orientation, providing end-to-end automation with optimum performance, scalability & transparency as per the BCBS239 principles.

The Verisk Advantage

What differentiates Fintellix is the global presence that the company enjoys due to its parent company, Verisk. It was in 2017 that Verisk Analytics, Inc. signed an agreement to acquire Fintellix, a Bangalore-based data solutions company specializing in the development of data management platforms and regulatory reporting solutions for financial institutions. With this acquisition, Verisk will be able to expand data hosting and address the growing requirements in a better manner. As per the agreement, Fintellix became a part of the Argus Business. Financial institutions worldwide receive information, scoring solutions, and advisory services with the help of Argus. Both Argus and Verisk realized a value addition because of integrating Fintellix’s advanced data management platform, along with its regulatory reporting expertise.

"Nicholas Daffan, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Verisk Analytics further strengthens Fintellix’s think tank as he brings his expertise of creating a technology environment at Argus"

The acquisition enabled the organization in delivering better services and highly advanced solutions to its customers. Moreover, with this move, Verisk plans to expand and strengthen its foothold in India. Furthermore, this move will establish Verisk’s expertise in the field of data solutions across several geographies around the globe. Verisk also brings its global leadership to the table with Lisa Bonalle Hannan, the president of Verisk Financial at the helm. Ms. Hannan has more than 20 years of experience in payments, credit cards, and consumer banking, and has worked extensively in corporate strategy and new product development. She most recently served as Verisk Financial’s chief marketing officer and business development executive, responsible for marketing, business development, partnerships, strategic alliances, and media effectiveness.

Nicholas Daffan, executive vice president and chief information officer of Verisk Analytics further strengthens Fintellix’s think tank as he brings his expertise of creating a technology environment at Argus that’s highly optimized for the kind of big data and easily consumable, scalable analytics.