Rennies Bank has gone live with CheckFree’s Accurate NXG solution to help better manage potential operational risk across all nostro and internal accounts.
The bank is a South African specialist foreign exchange and trade finance bank that is part of the Bidvest Group. It had been using SmartStream’s Corona cash reconciliation solution, but Jill Murtagh, director of payments and settlements at Rennies Bank, says she wanted to do more than just the basic cash reconciliation. "The reconciliation environment can provide a lot of intelligence about the health of the business, and we needed greater visibility and analysis capabilities," she says. "We also wanted the ability to reconcile more than just cash, and extend to confirmation and system-to-system reconciliation."
Accurate NXG will be used to reconcile growing volumes of transactions from a variety of data sources. These include nostro transactions resulting from foreign exchange deals along with transactions from Rennies’ retail banking division, South African Rand bank accounts and internal control accounts.
Reconciliation and operational risk management are critical at Rennies. Reporting and sign off on outstanding items was previously done manually, and analysis often required extracting data into a spreadsheet for manipulation. Using the dashboard module of Accurate NXG, Rennies will be able to identify any exceptions or areas of potential risk and automatically escalate these items to the board level when necessary. Senior management at Rennies will also use the dashboard to electronically sign off all reconciliations, demonstrating compliance with defined operational control policies.
The CheckFree package was deployed in six months, and Murtagh says she was impressed by both the software and project management. "We went live last week, and that was the first I’d heard about the project for some time. The head of reconciliation and their team, working with CheckFree, was able to run the project extremely smoothly."