BrazilVolkswagen taps BearingPoint for regulatory reporting services
Volkswagen’s banking and financing arm has ditched its inhouse regulatory reporting solution in favour of Abacus360, as the division seeks to streamline its reporting operations.
While the globe’s largest carmaker Volkswagen sells well-known cars such as Audi, Porsche and VW, its subsidiary Volkswagen Bank is in essence a financial services firm. Volkswagen Bank provides banking services to Group entities, and supports dealers with leasing and financing for new and used vehicles. With assets of €83 billion, Volkswagen Bank is Europe's largest automotive vehicle financial services organisation.
Its endeavours in the banking space mean that Volkswagen Bank is bound to all kinds of regulatory reporting requirements, both to local as well as European authorities. The institution among others reports to the German central bank, and to the European Central Bank (ECB) under the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM). Under the SSM, the ECB is granted the mandate for direct and indirect supervision of banks in EU member states – Volkswagen Bank classifies as one of Europe’s larger banks and hence together with 119 peers falls under the framework for direct supervision.
Since the launch of SSM in 2014, Volkswagen Bank has been delivering its reports through an in-house developed regulatory reporting solution. Now, five years down the line, the German-origin institution has opted to phase out its own solution and adopt a standard software package with a demonstrated track record in the industry. A major share of European banks under direct SSM supervision, as well as insurers and financial service providers, use Abacus360 – a regulatory technology solution by consulting firm BearingPoint – to fulfil their reporting and analysis needs.
“Abacus360 is a standard software for national and international prudential reporting, statistical reporting as well as granular reporting and ad-hoc reporting,” explained Jürgen Lux, a leader in BearingPoint’s solutions arm.
According to BearingPoint, Abacus360 offers a high-performance environment – it facilitates faster processing times, cost-effective scalability, higher transparency and more agility, while allowing clients the luxury of not having to build and maintain such systems themselves.
Volkswagen Bank joins a roster of dozens of financial services institutions that use BearingPoint’s ‘Regulatory-as-a-Service’ product, including Bank fuer Sozialwirtschaft and DZ Bank (Germany), Triodos Bank (Netherlands), Raiffeisen Bank (Romania) and Zurich Insurance (Switzerland).
The deal comes at a time when regulatory reporting is under growing scrutiny. Heightened financial supervision is placing cost pressures on SSM banks, and at the same time deadlines for implementation of new regulations are getting shorter. Meanwhile, performance improvement that feeds out of reporting is strongly driven by data, with vast amounts of data at increasingly granular levels which has to be processed. This is inciting banks to rethink their technology strategies, and as a result, many are turning to more agile RegTech solutions.
Alongside supporting the design and implementation, which according to BearingPoint partner Maciej Piechocki is typically “very short”, Volkswagen Bank has opted to tap BearingPoint’s managed services solution for Abacus360, meaning that it will be completely unburdened by the firm’s (technology) consultants. The engagement will see BearingPoint deliver the software, lead all tasks and processes of the technical operation, and take responsibility for the infrastructure and user support services.
Lux: “We are delighted that Volkswagen Bank has placed its trust in our full-service offering consisting of software and managed services. With managed services, we offer a comprehensive range of services to support our customers in the increasing complexity of reporting not only with our software but also with the reporting process.”
