With their joint offering, the companies will help small and medium-sized financial institutions, which are struggling with the steadily increasing regulatory requirements. New regulations such as AnaCredit and MREL, new data models, and challenging timelines for new regulatory requirements threaten to exceed the capacities of smaller institutions. The joint offering allows financial institutions to outsource their regulatory reporting processes and covers both the business processes and technical operation as well as software maintenance and further development.

Jean-Henrik Zitterbart, Industry Leader Banking & Financial Markets DACH, IBM, says:
“We see growing demand for business process outsourcing services in the market as smaller institutions find it increasingly difficult to keep pace with regulatory requirements in terms of workload, financial and risk aspects. This is one of the reasons why we strengthened our team a year ago with an operational reporting specialist team and have already taken over the technical reporting for several clients. Our joint offering with BearingPoint is based on a standardized solution and processes that enable economies of scale.”

Bodo Windmöller, Chief Product Officer RegTech at BearingPoint, comments:
“Our partnership with IBM Services and our joint RegTech factory offering respond to fundamental market needs and is another important milestone for our growth strategy. Financial institutions are under pressure in two ways - to achieve regulatory compliance and at the same time limit the costs in an increasingly volatile, uncertain and complex environment. Our joint BPO offering with IBM built upon our well-established Abacus platform is tailored to this need.”

BearingPoint has been working for years with a strong network of cooperation partners in order to ramp up the collaborative work around the Abacus Solution Suite. In 2017, BearingPoint launched a Solutions Alliance Partner program with leading consulting firms. The aim of this initiative is to respond faster to market requirements and offer tailored solutions to better suit needs and preferences of clients.

BearingPoint’s Abacus platform is currently being used by approximately 2,700 small, medium and large international banks and insurers in over 20 European countries to meet their reporting obligations in compliance with Basel III, MiFID II/MiFIR, EMIR II, Solvency II and further regulations. The software is available as an on-premise installation and as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, the option chosen by a growing number of clients.