Crédit Agricole CIB: Architecture Reference Data Using Asset Control

The systems were expensive, cost intensive and contained data discrepancies.

Accenture, using Asset Control’s software, helped Crédit Agricole CIB enhance the quality of its reference information, secure greater returns from its data operations and ensure compliance with regulatory initiatives.

As a result, Crédit Agricole CIB has been able to simplify its overall information system and lower its implementation costs. The solution helps ensure the bank’s data is accurate and secure, resulting in more precise profit-and-loss information and improved financial risk management.

Read how we also helped Crédit Agricole improve its global cash position system using Calypso.

As a result of a merger, Crédit Agricole CIB was coping with a large number of disparate and duplicate data feeds and legacy applications within the bank’s counterparty and market data systems. The systems were cost intensive and difficult to manage, with discrepancies in data for the same instruments across business lines creating compliance and valuation issues. To overcome these data management issues, Crédit Agricole CIB sought to:

• Create a single market-data repository capable of centralizing data globally across all departments to ensure clean data for critical business applications.
  
  
• Simplify the overall technical architecture for its data management system.
  
  
• Reduce application maintenance by double digits.
  
  
• Decrease costs of personnel working with market data by double digits.

To help achieve these objectives, Crédit Agricole CIB chose to work with Accenture, largely because of Accenture’s extensive knowledge from more than a decade of experience in managed data services.

After helping Crédit Agricole CIB select Asset Control as the underlying software package, Accenture implemented the Crédit Agricole CIB Architecture Reference Data (CARD) solution in the bank’s French operations. Based on Asset Control’s AC Plus centralized data management software, the new system now manages reference data, corporate actions and market data across all asset classes.

The CARD system receives data feeds from third parties and internal systems, conforms and consolidates the data, and removes and corrects incomplete, inaccurate, inconsistent or duplicate data.

Furthermore, it produces a cleansed and validated "golden copy" of the information, and sorts and organizes the data for delivery to numerous downstream front-office, back-office, risk and accounting applications throughout Crédit Agricole CIB’s operations.

With more than 30,000 instruments, 30 inbound interfaces and 100 outbound interfaces covered, Crédit Agricole CIB’s solution is among the most innovative and comprehensive reference data systems in the capital markets environment to date. It includes all asset classes, all static data and all global instruments, as well as derived data used for value-at-risk calculations.

In designing and implementing the CARD solution, Accenture, using Asset Control’s software, has helped Crédit Agricole CIB enhance the quality of its reference information, secure greater returns from its data operations and ensure compliance with regulatory initiatives. As a result, Crédit Agricole CIB has been able to simplify its overall information system. Accenture helped the bank lower its implementation costs further by utilizing offshore teams in India for the development and systems integration work.

The CARD solution helps ensure the bank’s data is accurate and secure, resulting in more precise profit and loss information, and improved financial risk management. With the implementation of its enterprise-wide reference data system, Accenture is helping Crédit Agricole CIB continue on its path as a high-performance business.