All companies big and small rely on some form of data analysis. These are a few classic examples of different procedures performed:
Mapping of financial accounts to business processes. On a quarterly basis, a full download of General Ledger per accounts and legal entities was used to analyse key changes and trends. Each account was then mapped to dedicated business processes for financial reporting purposes and control testing.
Re-performance of Finance and Operations reconciliations. Results of reconciliation reports were completely re-performed based independently sourced data and re-confirmed matching criteria. This was done as part of financial auditing and independent verification testing, specifically for bank reconciliations, nostro/depo reconciliations, inter-system reconciliations.
Valuation challenger models. Integral to financial reporting in investment banking, some financial valuations were reperformed based on a combination of inventory of long/short positions and externally sourced data. Completeness of inventory was additionally verified through inter-system reconciliations with sub-ledgers. The analysis helped to identify any gaps in the valuation process (missing prices or positions) and other analytical ‘red flags’ – stale positions/price data, discrepancies in valuations, etc.
Findings and actions tracking. While the information on findings and remedial actions was centralised in firm-wide applications, this data was then extracted and represented in a more sensible way for management to look at the timelines, consider potential resourcing demands and workload planning.
Customer KYC data analysis. Using source data on successful customer application attempts and documentation/facial recognition checks over 6 months period to analyse and drill-down into specific issues and root causes. Due to the volume of data, a dedicated SQL database was developed and used for bulk processing and data analysis.