The ability to create internal (management) and external (regulatory) reports from a single data source is a requirement moving higher up the regulatory agenda, as demonstrated by Basel II and its subsequent reviews, which continually state that risk information presented to regulators, senior management and the markets has to be fully reconcilable. Further to this, working on the same validated data source not only lets financial institutions comply with regulations, but also provides detailed and accurate insight into their business.

In the eyes of the regulators, traditional spreadsheet reporting is no longer deemed to be powerful enough to demonstrate if a firm has a tight control of the quality, security and auditability of its data. Reporting applications defined in ReportBuilder TNG are produced under the full control of FRSGlobal's ReportGenerator, a robust engine which automates the production of regulatory reports.

ReportBuilder TNG has been designed for non-technical users to create custom reporting applications based on their valuable functional knowledge without having to rely upon technical resource. With ReportBuilder TNG, firms have the ability to create reporting applications to run:

• Principle-based reports for regulators;
  
• Prescriptive reports for countries over and above the 40 that FRSGlobal already provides*
  
• Internal Management Information System (MIS) style reports to support regulatory reports;
  
• Non-banking regulatory reports (e.g. for tax authorities);
  
• Head office reports which contain 80% of the information submitted to regulators plus 20% internal information.

All reports generated from ReportBuilder TNG allow users to drill-down and identify any inconsistencies or errors in the source data to a granular level. This fully audited manual update feature enables users to amend or add information in reports, either when final accounting adjustments need to be made, when inaccuracies of data from disparate source systems occur, or when there is simply a lack of data at the time the report is run. The drill-up functionality then allows users to see which other reports are impacted by these changes so the necessary adjustments can be made. Reports defined using ReportBuilder TNG also allow variance analysis over any reporting period, meaning that reporting of current risk figures can be directly compared with previous ones, allowing trends, profitability and performance analysis to be conducted in a meaningful way.

Kieran Leahy, SVP Product Management comments: "Preventative measures to ensure that a financial crisis of this magnitude does not occur again all have one common denominator - all levels of the business need to have a deeper insight into the organisation's inner workings. This new version of ReportBuilder makes it even easier for financial institutions to gain full visibility into their business by allowing the creation of a vast range of reports drawn from a single version of the truth."

*Selected countries subject to FRSGlobal's prior approval.