Common Industry Issues

ALaS Control and P&L Reconciliation Infrastructure

The financial sector has focused much of its attention over the past 20 years on the automation of trade clearance and the enhancing of front office applications. Additionally, over the same period of time, ledger applications such as SAP were developed to support inventory and financial reporting.

The area that has been most neglected from an automation perspective has been the product control function. So while volumes have increased at a record pace, and the products have become more complicated, the product controllers have still been working off of paper and spreadsheets. All of this has resulted in an uncontrolled expensive to maintain environment. Below are many of the issues that the trading arms of financial services firms are encountering today.

• Access and Excel Based P&L Environments
• Lack of Management Transparency (breaks and adjustments)
• Product Controllers Prepare P&L and Don't Analyze
• Multiple Control Processes Across Business and Regions
• Poor or No Procedures Documentation
• Disjointed Controls between Front, Middle, and Back Offices
• No Security or Audit Trail around P&L Sign-Off
• Lack of Systematic Currency Revaluation and P&L Sell Off
• Lack of Securitiy around Spreadsheets and Access DB
• No Central Store of Adjustments