Case Study: e-Correspondence Archive Validation
Problem
As regulatory requirements continue to evolve, banks need robust archiving solutions that meet current and emerging requirements to retain critical documentation. Regulated industries are required to preserve and produce an expanding volume of records across multiple systems used for communications between internal users, third parties and customers.
Our client needed a solution to accurately measure their compliance with SEC and FINRA regulations (SEC 17a–3, SEC 17a–4, FINRA 2210 and FINRA 2211) for archival and retrieval of “e-correspondence” between regulated users. Their current validation process was lacking in its ability to measure the accuracy and completeness of its e-correspondence archive, calling into question whether they could readily deliver the necessary documents for discovery as required by the regulating authorities.
Process
To measure and improve the quality of their e-correspondence archive, this company engaged Meridian to develop a new archive-validation platform. Meridian’s solution measures archive data quality across over thirty internal and external source systems including email, instant messaging and message-board platforms. The system performs millions of complex validations each day, based on defined business rules, at predetermined frequencies. Additionally, the platform uses an enhanced, automated process to identify regulated users and their associated email and messaging accounts.
The system publishes validation results to a custom business analytics platform, from which real time alerts, management dashboards and operational reports are produced.
Results
The key benefits realized from Meridian’s solution include:
- Industry leading regulatory compliance, reducing compliance risk
- Increased visibility into possible gaps in archived documentation
- Measurement of improvements to the archive over time
- Reduced operational costs
- Reduced points of failure
Case Study : Product Profitability
Problem
This client had invested years of effort and millions of dollars in an EDW platform that provided little to no value to the company. Within twelve weeks Meridian delivered a product-profitability solution that was immediately put into production and used in the field to drive sales and marketing decisions. It is difficult to accurately measure the profitability of individual products when it comes to allocation of indirect costs associated with the product. Also the bank needed to understand product profitability across organizational and market hierarchies.
Process
In order to calculate product profitability, Meridian designed and built a solution that included an ETL engine to source financial and statistical data from over twenty sources, a rules-based allocation engine to allocate revenue and costs to products, and multiple hierarchies to calculate and “roll up” product profitability at various levels in the organization and points in their markets.
Results
Meridian’s platform, delivered to production in twelve weeks, populated a data mart and rendered reports and dashboards in Cognos. These reports were published to Bank executives, LOB and market leaders, and customer relationship managers to drive decisions about which products to be marketed most aggressively in which markets.
Case Study : Intelligent Document Generation
Problem
This banking client wanted to replace a third-party product with a custom document-preparation solution that provided rich functionality and eliminated the need for vendor support. The existing system was difficult to use, lacked WYSIWYG capability and did not support business rules sophisticated enough to handle the conditions needed for all scenarios. This client needed a more fully featured way to produce loan documents for closing.
Process
The client engaged Meridian Technologies to manage, architect, build and deploy an application that would automate the creation of custom loan packages. The new application needed to scale to over 1000 internal users and outside attorneys for processing loan closing packages.
Results
A web-based user interface was designed and developed that, based on specific loan criterion, assembles loan documents and creates custom loan packages. Meridian designed and implemented a new data model that contains complex business and legal rules for the system. Integration between separate but dependent systems was implemented using web services. The client reduced cost and risk by automating the preparation of loan closing packages.
