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3 Agile Process Hacks for Finance Teams in Banking & Financial Services

Finance teams in banking and financial services face a number of unique challenges. You need to stay ahead of quickly changing market conditions, mitigate risks and help your organization deliver return on investment for your customers, all while navigating an ever-changing list of regulatory compliance requirements. With all that on your plate, finding ways to be more agile so you can be a better partner to the business is critical, but no small task.

As you consider how your team can streamline processes to be more flexible and adaptable, questions top of mind might include: How can we adequately prepare for events such as interest rate shocks and market downturns? How can we measure key business metrics—assets under management (AUM) and return on assets ratio (ROA), for example—in real time? What’s the best way to disclose financial and compliance information and build trust with our management, investors, regulators and the public?

While there’s no simple answer to any of these questions, one thing is certain: Being more agile requires a seamless connection between people, processes and technology, especially in the face of ever-present change. In this blog post, we’ll discuss three simple steps your finance team can take to streamline key finance-led processes to be faster and more efficient:

1. Integrate your templates for net interest margin planning

2. Build repeatable workflows to streamline SEC reporting

3. Empower your leaders to tell a story with your data

We’ll also look at the best practices institutions like yours are using to do all of the above and more.

1. Use Integrated Templates For Net Interest Margin Planning

Monitoring interest income is a critical part of the strategic planning process. As the primary source of revenue for retail banks and credit unions, you need to keep a close eye on your interest margins, right down to the individual product level to ensure your business plans are as well informed as possible.

However, if product-level data is siloed in your enterprise resource planning (ERP), asset liability management (ALM) or other source systems, you won’t have an easy way to identify your most profitable financial products. Instead, you’ll have to dig through a bunch of spreadsheets to find the data you’re looking for, and that’s why having one source of truth is so important for net interest margin planning.

By connecting your source systems, automating data inputs and using purpose-built templates for your actuals, forecasts and scenario analysis, you’ll achieve a holistic view of interest income within one secure platform. You’ll also be able to back up your business plans with per-product revenue estimates relative to prime lending rates and yield curves—setting up stakeholders to easily make timely, data-driven business decisions without all the manual effort.

The finance team at ATB Financial, the largest bank headquartered in the Canadian province of Alberta, is a great example of how agile interest margin planning can be put into action. Working with Vena, ATB’s team tracks consolidated revenue figures for more than 100 unique banking products. With all that data at the team’s fingertips, it’s easier for them to quickly determine whether actual versus budget differences are due to margins or price/volume variances. It’s allowed the team and its business partners to plan with a level of granular detail they’d never experienced before.

Learn how ATB Financial transformed budgeting and forecasting in just three months with Vena.

2. Streamline Sec Reporting With Repeatable Workflows

There are few industries in the world subject to greater scrutiny than banking and financial services. Financial institutions are subject to increasingly stringent regulatory reporting requirements. But if you simplify the reporting cycle with automated consolidations and data entries, SEC filings will feel like a breeze instead of a burden. The same logic applies to larger institutions for CCAR reporting and DFAST submissions. You need to design efficient processes that are easy to understand and execute.

But efficiency is often the biggest challenge with financial regulatory reporting, given how collaborative the process really is. If budget owners, managers and executive leadership all need to sign off on one report before it's filed, you might have multiple versions of the same template floating around. You need to align every stakeholder with specific roles in the reporting process and that’s where custom workflows come in handy. They allow you to assign tasks based on individual roles and security permissions, while also ensuring your reports are done quickly, error free and with a full audit trail for tracking. As your team repeats the process for each subsequent reporting cycle, speed and data accuracy will only get better.

Terry Hardy, former Manager of SEC Reporting at Wells Fargo, has first-hand experience seeing how large financial institutions have been able to experience the benefits of repeatable workflows. He helped implement Vena at the banking giant in 2012, overseeing all aspects of regulatory reporting until his retirement in 2019. Working with Vena, Terry was able to:

Automatically detect variances between reporting periods

Track changes to SEC filings and reporting templates with detailed audit trails

Develop an SEC regulatory reporting framework built on teamwork and cross-functional collaboration

To learn more regulatory best practices from Terry, check out his free, CPE-accredited talk, “Transforming Regulatory Reporting Through Teamwork” on plantogrow.com.

3. Tell A Powerful Story With Your Data

Have you ever prepared for a meeting with your board or asset-liability committee, but didn’t quite know how to effectively tell the story behind your numbers? You’re probably not alone, because with so many external reporting requirements in the banking and financial services industry, it can sometimes be difficult to determine which KPIs to focus on internally and how to communicate impact to the right stakeholders in the right way.

But regardless of what metrics you use to define success—whether it’s AUM over benchmark, ROA (Return on Assets), ROE (Return on Equity), sales per branch or others—how you deliver that data is what’s important when it comes to driving performance and efficiencies. Effective, data-driven storytelling with easy-to-understand dashboards that share actionable insights is the key to engaging stakeholders and influencing more informed decision making throughout every stage of your planning cycle.

When built well, dashboards allow you to identify relationships between key metrics, provide a visual representation of important trends and maintain complete transparency across the entire organization. And as you and your business partners execute your plans, dashboards serve as a real-time indicator of emerging trends and performance, making it a lot easier for you to pivot and adjust course if necessary.

Enova International—an online financial services firm with more than 1300 employees around the world—does a great job turning numbers into insightful narratives. The finance team maintains agility by working with Vena to release on-demand “flash reports” at the beginning and end of close periods, which give managers a live look at interest margins and cost of revenue. Vena’s real-time dashboards provide context and helpful reference points, making it easy to track the evolution of those metrics as the business grows.

Check out this webinar to learn more about how Vena helped Enova’s finance team ramp up its strategic analysis to drive business growth.

Finance teams in the banking and financial services industry deal with a lot of complexity and plenty of moving parts. But by taking the steps above to integrate key templates, streamline financial regulatory reporting workflows and build real-time dashboards for effective, data-driven storytelling, it won’t be long before you find the flexibility and adaptability you need to drive improved performance and efficiencies with greater agility.

Request a demo today and discover how Vena can help your finance team improve performance.

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