This story is all about numbers! And why wouldn’t it be? It’s the financial transformation of a global bank with revenues of nearly $20B annually. (That’s just the first number.) Standard Chartered is more than 150 years old, operating in over 70 countries with 1700 branches. Now that you have the lay of the land, check out what Standard Chartered has accomplished. The bank can perform up to 1B open trades a day with 80M transactional processing points. They are now integrating those 600 source systems with financial data to create a ‘golden source’ that allows them to reconcile in just 60 minutes.
The team from Standard Chartered embarked on “Project Rubicon,” a direct reference to the ancient river where Julius Caesar passed the ‘point of no return.’ With the results Standard Chartered has achieved, they don’t want to go back! Specifically, “Project Rubicon” is an accounting hub that enables a bank-wide “golden source” of financial data. The accounting hub generates summarized accounting postings based on centralized business accounting rules and posts it to the GL, retaining detail to trace back to every transaction. This provides a much stronger foundation for daily reporting than traditional data warehousing where transaction data and accounting data are both sourced independently but unable to be fully integrated because the linkage detail is often not retained by the Transaction Processing (TP) systems and the ledger only has the summary postings. When you add adjustments, allocations of revenue & expenses, along with changing organization structures to the mix to then drill-down and drill-across, functionality is often impossible using just a traditional data warehouse, but with an accounting hub-driven data warehouse on the Teradata IntelliFlex™, it is both feasible and straight-forward to implement.
What does this do? The ability to reconcile and report quickly in every country Standard Chartered operates is truly game-changing. Not just in productivity, but also in compliance.
“We can comply with all of the regulatory requirements. We have the data available at our fingertips if the regulators ask for it. We can aggregate client data. We can do straight through processing. The power of the analytics of having all of these transactions in one place at the same time, that’s reliable. It gives me the power. Having that transaction data set that is reconciled, you know, the limitations are endless. There’s no limitation because the first thing you could probably do is put some extended intelligence over that data set.” – Wayne Mendham, Global Head, Strategic Initiatives & Client Investor Banking
A lot of the challenges had to do with the vision as opposed to the outcome. We’ve come a long way and obviously they’re partners with this.” Wayne Mendham, Global Head, Strategic Initiatives & Client Investor Banking
All of this give more insight into risk and potential fraud to make more informed decisions.
“We’re a bank. We take risk. It doesn’t reduce risk. You understand the risk. And then by understanding the risk, you can take a decision what you do with that risk. You can actually keep it or mitigate it. So that’s a different concept from a corporate perspective. Banks take risk because we actually take the pot of money, then we lend that money. We actually have in the middle, a risk which is called credit risk. Therefore, we do take risk, but it’s actually better understanding that risk is what you do in a bank, not mitigate it. The decision is making on what risk you do have. That’s the difference.“ Wayne Mendham, Global Head, Strategic Initiatives & Client Investor Banking
Alongside Standard Chartered data scientists was Think Big Analytics to design and implement, architect and advise throughout the entire project, because no one wants to cross the Rubicon by themselves.