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If there's one constant in this changing world, it's that banking leaders want more efficient and accurate profit and loss (P&L) answers as quickly as possible. Technology is enabling near real-time P&L reporting – and it's the responsibility of product and finance controllers to help ensure that the reports are accurate.
Real-time P&L reporting is not easy. Controllers often encounter inefficient finance systems, and they strategize on how to fill gaps in the firm's data that can cause erroneous reporting. Only the highest quality processes and data will produce the efficiency and accuracy expected by senior executives.
Bank CFOs are turning to modern finance systems, including
Solving Finance Processes for Chief Financial Officers
Banks and financial service companies continue to wrestle with operational inefficiencies and technology debts that affect controllers' ability to effectively manage complex finance processes -- such as daily P&L reporting, balance sheet substantiation, month end close -- while supporting regulatory compliance and risk management, including credit, liquidity, market, and operational risks. Optimizing costs, improving profitability, and navigating the digital transformation journey are top of mind for CFOs. As capital requirements shift, CFOs should identify areas where costs can be reduced without compromising efficiency or compliance.
Among the pressing issues are:
- Financial product complexity
- Lack of standardized foreign exchange risk management of multi-currency portfolios
- Disparate chart of accounts structures
- Lack of granular details in sub-ledger to help product control investigate and validate P&L
- Gaps in the workflow from the sub-ledger to enterprise general ledger
- Manual, disparate, and siloed processes for accounting control, reporting and substantiation which can delay daily financial close processing
- Incorrect trade capture and/or pricing, such as position, trade price and reference data format
Banks face a three-fold challenge when moving to daily reporting. The quality of data can vary from one source to another and the data may not be timely or complete. This is often compounded by outdated platforms which often slow sdown finance processes.
Speeding up reporting with centralization and automation
Banks and financial institutions are tackling inefficiency in two ways: centralization and continued automation. Many still use a federated or decentralized system of controls and data that served them well when a P&L time lag was acceptable. But in a real-time system, a federated structure becomes a barrier, not least because of the time it takes to standardize data before compiling a report. Centralizing data storage, which also typically involves data standardization, is a path that many leading banks and financial institutions are taking to achieve real-time financial reporting.
Some global banks are producing daily P&L reports, but they're doing so at a high cost with manual interventions resulting in a labor-intensive reconciliation process.
Manual intervention is still all too common, even at many of the largest banks and financial institutions. Expanding automation is a necessity if controllers are going to deliver trusted, real-time financial reports. An increasing reliance on automation is where the industry is head considering the detailed information demanded by the C-suite and regulators.
Syncing up data with cloud innovation
On premise computing remains an integral part of many financial accounting systems, but the burst computing needed for real-time reporting is something cloud platforms excel at. Today's cloud technology provides data visibility from start to finish; it helps greatly reduce data latency; and it can make it easier to improve data quality. Oracle is at the forefront of cloud technology and has a breadth of capabilities in centralizing data and expanding automation.
Oracle's integrated suite of finance products help banks to automate financial management processes, obtain a holistic view of financial data to help increase forecasting accuracy, and create a seamless flow of rules-based data and accounting, making it possible to connect such disparate things as front-office systems and the general ledger.
A modern finance system architecture allows banks and financial institutions to capture detailed instrument level data integrated directly with front-office platforms, allowing for standardization and aggregation of data based on business rules, thereby simplifying the financial reporting process with automated accounting and insightful analytics.
Improve reporting capabilities with end-to-end finance systems architecture
Banking modernization doesn't have to be complex. Using Oracle's end-to-end finance architecture, enterprises can leverage a wide range of cloud-based innovations without undertaking complicated and expensive legacy core modernization.
Drawing on our strong banking industry experience, PwC offers a holistic Oracle model system and Standardized Tool for Accounting Rules capabilities that embraces a design-by-exception approach. PwC's pre-configured banking and asset management model system provides a live Oracle environment with industry-specific use cases, configurations, test cases and reports that run smoothly on industry-leading digital assets.
For example, the diagram below shows data from multiple core banking systems flowing to a central repository. After preprocessing, data is sent to Oracle's Accounting Hub, which uses a common chart of accounts and transactional data attributes to generate detailed sub-ledger journal entries. After processing in Accounting Hub, sub-ledger journals are passed to the general ledger.
PwC can empower organizations with industry-leading automation and data standardization that utilizes the vast capabilities of Oracle Finance Modernization. Combining higher quality data with PwC's out-of-the-box reporting capabilities can provide financial services organizations with deeper, richer insights.
Benefits include:
- Simplified reporting, faster close processing and enhanced reconciliation
- Best practices for enhanced business outcomes
- End-to-end finance data model by product
- Industry standard event models
- Reduced manual processing
- Seamless integration of the sub-ledger with the general ledger
- Advanced analytics including pre-configured industry specific KPI
- Predictive and forward-looking scenarios supported by machine learning and data science to enable stronger reporting using Oracle Fusion Analytics
In conjunction with our services, PwC has Standardized Tool for Accounting Rules capabilities that can help expedite design and configuration of accounting rules and financial data visualization by leveraging pre-configured, business event models and a repository of accounting rules for Oracle products common to both banking and capital markets, such as loans, deposits and derivatives.
These capabilities enable controllers to improve their reporting functions by using: 
- Preconfigured SaaS model, including chart of accounts configuration for banking
- Predefined data model and integrations to meet GAAP and other regulatory requirements
- Preconfigured narrative reporting capability to support call reports e.g. FR Y-9C
- Predefined, industry-specific accounting rules
- Pre-configured industry dashboards and KPIs on Oracle Analytics Cloud
- Instrument level average daily balance, revaluation and translation engine
CFOs across banking and financial services can effectively address their challenges by leveraging innovative digital and cloud-based solutions, supported by PwC's industry insights and capabilities. PwC deploys innovative solutions backed by our banking-specific experience to complement and extend the capabilities of Oracle Cloud ERP.
By leveraging digital and cloud-based solutions, CFOs can drive operational efficiency, make informed decisions, reduce costs, enhance data security, and confirm regulatory compliance in an evolving banking industry.
Together, PwC and Oracle are helping financial institutions bridge data gaps and digitize processes and achieve tangible outcomes.
Your organization can unlock the value of next generation reporting and analytics capabilities to support the CFO's modern finance agenda. Explore services and solutions from
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