Belfius, formerly Dexia Bank, offers a wide range of financial services to individuals and businesses, including over-the-counter derivatives, foreign exchange, money markets and securities.

With Autonomy Scrittura, Belfius has a single platform that provides end-to-end management for its back-office trade confirmations. Belfius was previously using a range of disparate confirmation systems. The bank needed to consolidate these into a single system that would allow its end users to take ownership of key business processes such as template management, document generation, reporting and document management. The project helps make the bank's system more flexible, while also helping it adapt to increasing trade volumes and facilitate the onboarding of new products.

"Because we operate in an extremely fast-paced sector, we have a strategic need to reduce complication in the trading process, while still controlling the risk factors," said Johan Roels, head, Transaction Services and Organization Financial Markets, Belfius. "Autonomy Scrittura helps us cut through the complexity and reduce both our risk and costs, and gives us a single platform to meet our present and future needs."

Through the implementation of Scrittura, Belfius has been able to substantially reduce processing times for all trade types. Scrittura also has helped to mitigate risk through end-to-end management of trade documents, and has enabled end users to take control of key activities. Belfius' users directly maintain trade confirmation templates in four different languages and, with Scrittura, have been able to reduce the number of templates from more than 200 to just 75.

"Financial institutions have to operate at a dizzying speed to stay competitive, while facing ever-heightening regulatory scrutiny," said Nigel Hutchinson, senior vice president, Protect Solutions Europe, Autonomy, an HP Company. "With Scrittura's proven trade-processing capabilities, we provide the tools they need to keep pace and reduce risk, while also taking control of the total cost of ownership."

Autonomy Scrittura is designed to give financial institutions full automation and control of back-office trade confirmation processes, such as generating document templates for trades. Scrittura is powered by Autonomy's cornerstone platform, IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). IDOL can form a conceptual understanding of the meaning of information in any format and language. IDOL also provides optical character and intelligent character recognition, meaning that it can automatically match inbound and counterparty documents. This gives capital market institutions a view into all data related to trade processing activity, allowing them to reduce their own costs and comply with increasingly stringent industry regulations.