Guest post by
Bhuvaneswari Venkataraman, Principal Consultant, Infosys
Supervisors in financial institutions worldwide recognise the challenges in aggregating risk data during risk reporting. To elaborate this further, let's take a simple scenario. During a Supervisory Audit in a Bank, the report 'Basel II controls for Corporate Lending' showed Loan balances and record counts at different points in a data flow, however the numbers were different at each point. The author of the report claimed that the figures were meant to be different at each stage, as data was transformed, aggregated and filtered. However, there was no explanation for the calculations done during processing or for the items that had been excluded. There was no way to drill down to data elements that could be added back to match the totals in the aggregated data reflecting lack of confidence and difficulty in auditing the numbers.