Santander: creation of platform aligned with RDA (Risk Data Aggregation) principles

The Need

The objective of the project was to create a platform that would align the organization with RDA (Risk Data Aggregation) principles, established by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in 2013, which mainly aim at data risk management and compliance with regulations.

For this purpose, a central model was defined that takes information from the different sources available to the organization, unifying them in a single normalized, historical and certified repository.

The Solution

Phase 1:

In this first phase, the conceptual/physical RDA model was designed and built, and critical processes were automated to generate accounting and financial information, following local criteria (Uruguayan Central Bank), corporate and European (ECB) criteria.

Central and critical processes (engines) of BSU were implemented, which allow the generation of accounting and financial information of BSU with local criteria of Uruguay determined by the Uruguayan Central Bank and corporate criteria defined by the corporation and the European Central Bank.

Phase 2:

In this phase, the solution built in Phase 1 was extended to continue aligning the organization with RDA principles, allowing the preparation of different reports and calculation of metrics for presentation to the Corporation and the European Central Bank.

More than 12 critical processes of Banco Santander Uruguay were automated, eliminating existing manual processes, which allowed the automation of the calculation of 400 metrics. All this process under strict data quality management, with corresponding KPIs and traceability of the obtained information.

Phase 3:

In this phase, the solution was further extended and 8 critical processes of BSU were automated, allowing the automatic calculation of more than 200 metrics.

Each month end, more than 20 million records are processed, more than 600 metrics are automatically calculated, and more than 1000 KPIs are calculated from these processes, which allow evaluating the quality of the generated information.

Information exploitation:

One of the most important tasks of RDA is to allow the exploitation of the generated information, providing transparency, quality and security of the data.

In the first instance, the solution includes the implementation of the Financial Risks dashboard and metrics dashboard of the engines implemented in Phases 1 and 2, using Microsoft Power BI Desktop. The generation of the dashboards involved the analysis of the information presented in the current dashboards, the study of the data origin, as well as the analysis of the model and the transformations necessary to obtain the desired information. The exploitation of this information with Power BI implies fundamental changes regarding the current presentation of information in Excel, requiring an adaptation and change in the current design of the information dashboard.