Financial regulatory authorities are highlighting the need for contingency planning in case swine flu becomes a pandemic. According to riskart S.p.A., a key area where staff being ill could have serious financial impact on companies is Back Office administration.
“In many companies, derivative contracts are dealt with manually using spreadsheets,” explained Franco Marinotti, riskart’s ceo. “The regulatory authorities are concerned that if swine flu becomes a pandemic, people will be ill or unable to travel and so contingency plans need to be in place. It would not take much disruption due to swine flu to have a significant impact.”
The solution is automate as much as possible of the management and administration of Back Office financial contracts and riskart is one of the leading specialists in this area with its riskart® Derivatives Management suite. This provides an operational, administrative, accounting, cash flow and compliance support for structured derivatives – in particular, market traded and Over The Counter (OTC) derivatives. It is very flexible and versatile enabling it to handle a wide range of products including equity instruments, debt securities, structured derivatives, etc. and keep up with new regulatory requirements. riskart is currently working on further automating the processes to include cash settlement in response to recent customer requests spurred by recent financial events.
The riskart software draws on a history of over 30 years of providing financial solutions and currently counts three of Italy’s leading financial institutions amongst its users. The riskart Derivatives Management Suite is specifically designed for Back Office administration, accounting and compliance of complex products such as derivates, OTC, options, CDS, difficult instruments, futures, FX, and swaps. The software suite provides real time administration of risk, risk exposure, and cash flow management. The cash flows for the derivative contracts are all managed on a daily basis, taking input from other applications such as market prices, registry and updated positions. riskart then generates entries for all relevant aspects of accounting, in accordance with principles 32 and 39 of IAS/IFRS, along with an output database for external systems such as accounting servers, SWIFT for settlement operations, notification to supervisory bodies, auditing, etc. The riskart software can run on a variety of operating systems and can be used with all leading relational databases. Users can access the software by means of a web browser such as Microsoft Explorer or Mozilla Firefox for remote access via the Internet. It is multi-language supporting English and Italian with German and French coming soon.