In the financial services industry, compliance leaders know that to stay competitive they must build a function that’s more agile, adaptable, data-rich, and tech-driven. Ongoing regulatory changes are driving significant compliance-based cost increases as demand for fundamental change to standardize and risk-proof financial operations continues. To remain compliant, financial services institutions need to future-proof their operating models by modernizing applications and ways of working for better controls.

Numerous cases of fraud and mishaps have been reported throughout the financial services industry in recent years, mostly due to spreadsheet-based data processing on end-user computing (EUC) applications, which are often unregulated and not standardized. Human errors are a nightmare for compliance officers and cost financial services institutions billions of dollars every year in fines and wrong transfers.

EUC applications such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access have been an essential part of many operations in the financial-services industry, allowing end-users to manage, control, and manipulate data quickly and efficiently. The agile, cost-effective nature of these applications’ makes end-user computing appealing to business functions, but it also poses various challenges and risks.

Large financial institutions depend on many thousands of EUC applications, and more than a trillion dollars’ worth of computations are done using spreadsheets each year. Any application that leaves system-based processes in the hands of an average user poses huge risks in key functional areas such as:

• Month-end processes and adjustments: Converting local book balances to U.S. GAAP, tax adjustments, suspense clearing, custody fees, and P&L attributions
• Accounting: Recording business expenses, rewards, purchase orders, and interest payments
• Analytics: Analyzing profitability, FINRA, Basel, cost of credit
• Accrued expense adjustments: Handling fee computations, invoicing
• Regulatory reporting: Documenting 10K/10Q, FFIEC, FRY, liquidity updates, LCR, NSFR, borrowing capacity, and cashflow
• Taxation: Managing sales tax estimation, 1042 tax reporting of taxable corporate action events, and withholding totals

Most of the existing solutions to handle these risks lack the ability for enterprise-scale process orchestration. They also lack the necessary monitoring, auditing, security, and integration capabilities; access and version control; and are unable to provide an open system to extend product functionality. These factors, along with the urgent need to close the month-end or period-end accounting books, result in businesses managing and manipulating their data in nontechnical ways that are not process compliant.

The challenges enterprises need to solve

• Modernize processes and reduce dependence on desktop-based business applications  
• Prevent risks, errors, and fraud due to manual processes  
• Ensure regulatory compliance with rapidly changing standards  
• Reduce data redundancy due to data residing in several desktops and in several forms 

Wipro’s EUC remediation framework enables financial services institutions to tackle their operational challenges with solutions that remediate high-risk EUCs, while ensuring compliance standards are met. Our strategic interventions deliver comprehensive transformations of how companies govern, manage, prevent, and eliminate EUC risks and inefficiencies. We combine process simplification advisory and a pre-built platform for EUC development and management to address needs across operating and governing functions.

The framework itself is built on the following components:

• Advisory expertise: Wipro provides consulting for digital process simplification and legacy transformation
• EUC automation platform: A proven workhorse for EUC remediation
• Partnership with Appian: IP development and joint go-to-market solutions
• Ability to address buyer needs across the organization: CRO, CDO, CIO
   

EUC Automation Platform

Central to Wipro’s EUC remediation framework is an automation platform built on Appian, one of the industry’s leading low-code automation solutions. This platform provides a 100% configurable approach to EUC remediation. With the platform in place, financial services institutions can rapidly move from manual processes based on email and spreadsheets to an open-architecture-based model that combines the capabilities of Appian with a Java-based extract, transform, load (ETL) component.

The EUC platform is also extensible and can be enhanced or customized to meet specific requirements leveraging Appian’s out-of-the-box capabilities.

The platform enables clients to modernize and automate the following operations:

• Input and output integration: By integrating directly with upstream and downstream systems, the platform enables data to be sourced without human intervention, ensuring data integrity.
• User-access management: Integration with a corporate LDAP ensures role/group-based access to EUCs.
• Workflow: Each EUC is unique and has its own process flow. A dynamic workflow module allows users to configure the EUC process flow without any development effort.
• ETL processes: Various file types can be used for input and outputs to match what’s required by upstream systems.
• Compliance: Ensure adherence to regulatory requirements through standardized components and logic, version control, audit trails, and digital change management workflows.

The platform allows companies to leverage existing Excel-based working file templates, ensuring that operations teams have the flexibility to make changes while the system remains governed and controlled per IT standard processes. As the platform shifts development tasks from custom coding for each EUC to a completely configuration-driven automation, production runs are simplified through faster change management.

Key benefits of Wipro’s EUC Remediation framework