The Company
The client, a major player in the mortgage-backed financial services industry, realized that their existing IT infrastructure (data architecture, data warehouse, and data marts) was insufficient to meet forecasted data analysis and compliance (FAS 133) reporting needs, needing a new streamlined environment that eliminated manual processing, provided maximum data access flexibility, and integrated disparate data sources that met FAS 133 reporting requirements.
The Challenge
In an effort to enhance the Company’s operating performance and profitability, management identified several key opportunities that focused on both the strategic and operational sides of the business.
Major requirements included:
- Mitigate risk by improving quality of portfolio hedging by tracking purchase, sale, exercise and expiration of futures, options and their related uses via compliance (FAS 133) reporting Access to increased geographic coverage and more detailed product information
- Reduce losses eliminating errors (and associated losses) resulting from manual intervention in spreadsheet reporting and analysis processes; also provide for a surveillance function on the hedge funds
- Enhance productivity by developing a data mart of risk data and resultant yield calculations that reduced time and cost required to develop reports
The Solution
GRT partnered closely with both the business users and IT team to develop a new streamlined system and related data architectures. The new reporting architecture was built using the Business Objects universe. The resulting reports provided management with extensive ad-hoc analysis capabilities while meeting FAS 133 tracking requirements:
- Data was integrated from ten different data sources which included feeds from Bloomberg, Reuters and other data MBS/ABS vendors
- Technology environment leveraged an Oracle data warehouse and Business Objects reporting architecture
The Result
The company immediately realized measurable benefits in several key areas:
- The new automated reporting system and underlying data architecture/data warehouse eliminated the error-prone manual processing
- The redesigned data architecture and new Business Objects drill-down capability generated ad-hoc reports so customer issues can be resolved in real time
- Developed over 25 reports to meet FAS 133 and company reporting and analysis needs
- The new automated reporting system replaced the manual resource effort to develop daily and monthly reports and leveraged on the outside portfolio hedging software
