In the past years I’ve worked as a hands-on architect on the design and implementation of various data migration, data warehouse and business intelligence systems in various industries like Insurance, Retail, Food & Bev’s, Pharma & Investment Banking. Out of all nothing quite stands out like the complexity of building a Credit Risk Data Warehouse & Reporting system for the compliance with the Basel Regulatory requirements.
There is a specific satisfaction delivered by this kind of projects due to the high amount of upstream data generation systems and the complexity of regulatory reporting logic that has to sit on top of the business and technical flows.
Basel II required changes to a bank’s public disclosures and the regulatory review of their capital along with key requirements for credit data storage and management including the maintenance of a cradle-to-grave history of obligors.
The banks have to use consistent, reconciled risk data across origination and servicing, risk management, and financial reporting systems.

Usually the portfolio management division is managing the bank’s portfolio of credit risk exposure through modern portfolio theory and risk management techniques.

However, the way that they are collecting credit data from a number of systems and manual data feeds, is usually resulting in data inaccuracies.

In addition, the divisions usually finds it hard to identify the various potential sources for credit risk data or associated data gaps.

In order to have an easy journey to achieve this, the banks have to increase the overall enterprise focus on data architecture and to upgrade the data collection processes, storage and management capabilities.

The Challenges of implementing a Credit Risk Data Warehouse

Similar to a regular implementation of a Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence reporting systems the first step required is an in-depth analysis of the business flows and data flows in the context of credit risk reporting along with a detailed assessment of the Basel data compliance and reporting requirements.

This analysis represents the core document or the “bible” for the development and implementation of the data warehouse and is of critical importance that the resulted requirements and structures are formulated 100% from the business team’s perspective.

Based on the experience and expertise of the implementation team and understanding of Basel II, the following items will have to be completed in the inception & planning stages of the project:

• Identification of potential data sources and data gaps
• Development of data model and Basel II data mart design
• Design a detailed strategy for implementing the Credit Risk DW

It’s 100% the responsibility of the implementation team and of the data warehouse architect to help the Business team establish a project governance structure to drive implementation not only of the Credit Risk DW, but of all the Basel II-III requirements.

To address the scale of the Basel II compliance challenge the Architect and his team has to work closely with the business team to establish the work streams required to support the initiative.

Next week in How to Implement a Credit Risk Data Warehouse – Part 2 I’ll cover WBS, work streams, design, implementation and closure.

Until next time,
                                   keep learning, searching and succeeding…

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Article originally published on: Linkedin – How to Implement a Credit Risk Data Warehouse – Part 1