SunGard Trading and Risk Systems, an operating group of SunGard (NYSE:SDS), today announced that CoBiz, Inc., a $1.5 billion financial services company headquartered in Denver, has selected SunGard’s BancWare for asset and liability management (ALM), budgeting, planning and forecasting.
CoBiz selected BancWare because it wanted to have an integrated process for ALM, budgeting and planning, linked by consistent, reliable data. With consistent data assumptions and definitions, CoBiz will be able to roll budget forecasts into the BancWare ALM analytical engine, creating a dynamic process for generating financial plans that encompass the interest and non-interest revenue and costs for the company’s banking subsidiaries. The resulting forecasts will take into account everything from projected yield curves and customer behavior to office supplies by branch.
CoBiz also needed to replace an outsourced solution it had been using for ALM, which could no longer support its rapid growth. BancWare provides the flexibility and scalability CoBiz requires to continue to aggressively expand its services and customer base. BancWare provides an object-oriented model that allows users to create and model an unlimited number of custom situations, from complex financial instruments to any market behavior, business strategy or customer behavior. For optimum scalability, CoBiz will implement BancWare in a multi-user, distributed compute environment.
David Pass, senior vice president and chief information officer at CoBiz, said, "We wanted to link the ALM and budgeting and planning processes to create a tighter, more comprehensive loop for financial planning. Because BancWare enables us to create and modify budgets in a decentralized fashion, it will help us to shorten the budget cycle, create consistent revisions, and interactively manage and project cost center-level financial statements. Linking this with our ALM analysis will provide a more comprehensive understanding of our balance sheet and enable us to make better-informed strategic decisions such as where to allocate capital."
Terence Faherty, president of SunGard's BancWare operating unit, said, "Banks are increasingly leveraging risk management as part of overall corporate strategy by linking ALM more directly into other strategic areas such as allocation, profitability and budgeting/planning, giving ALM a more central role in financial planning and analysis. By helping CoBiz to integrate these processes and create data consistency, BancWare will help it to increase efficiency and productivity and improve its risk/return analysis."