Best Risk Management Technology Solution: Openlink

Central banks need tools that allow them to engage with capital markets in a smarter, less risky and more streamlined manner. Openlink has successfully managed to deliver this through its treasury and risk management tool, Findur. 

Established in 1997, Openlink was one of the first firms to offer central banks an entire trade processing solution, winning it Central Banking’s FinTech & RegTech Award for Best Risk Management Technology Solution. Findur collates all of a central bank’s critical decision‑making information into a single hub where risks can be seen and mitigated across the entire business. The company has prominent central bank clients across five continents. 

Major problems for central banks include the costs and risks associated with front‑ to back-office reconciliation. Findur manages all aspects of a central bank’s needs, such as foreign reserve investments, liability transactions and treasury operations, effectively reducing the costs and risks associated with capital market activities. 

In terms of managing risk, Findur’s risk management module has internal controls that grant its clients access to adequate capital without exceeding trading limits. The tool can be configured to measure compliance by trade, portfolio, asset type, legal agreement and business unit. Monitoring can also be set to block or warn of non-compliant trades in real time. For example, rates and prices entered by a bank can be compared through the platform by the regulator with market data and flagged if it is off market beyond a certain threshold. Trading activity can then be monitored to generate alerts for abnormal pricing behaviour around trades that may be executed close to the opening or close of market, or for prices that deviate from the average prices entered for similar transactions.

The system also has integrated reporting tools. Findur’s data repository uses an in‑memory database for fast storage and the retrieval of massive amounts of data; it serves as a central source of truth‑enabling real‑time reporting. The dashboards can be configured to provide customised summary graphs and reports that present surveillance activities. ‘Smart reports’, created from historical data, can also be used to detect abnormal trading activities. In the realm of payments, reports can detect unusual activity in a currency or flag payments when they are excessively large based on past activities.

Findur also helps mitigate the impact of new regulation. The system supports both cleared and uncleared over‑the‑counter derivatives trades, providing real‑time information across credit support annexes for bilateral counterparties, central counterparties and counterparty netting agreements. In effect, central banks can make more effective use of collateral while decreasing demand on other capital within the institution. 

Using Openlink’s Findur platform, central banks can better their understanding of liquidity, credit and market risks under a wider range of circumstances.

Read the full Central Banking FinTech RegTech Global Awards 2018 Winners In Focus report