IBM Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting
Transparency. Performance. Accuracy.
Reporting, when accurate and effective, informs actions. The better your information, the more effective your actions can be. The financial system-or more accurately accounting as a system-was the original information provider to the organization. As the need for information expanded, financial reporting did not keep pace with demand. Only summary results have been provided by standard financial systems architecture, which has remained unchanged in fundamental ways for decades. Standard reporting architectures provide limited amounts of detail; yet detail is critical to increased transparency, better traceability and a more thorough understanding of transactions across your financial enterprise.
High-performance techniques applied to high-volume problems
IBM Scalable Architecture for Financial Reporting (SAFR) offers a new approach to business intelligence. While other reporting techniques require preprocessed files that are already summarized, filtered or denormalized, SAFR offers an interconnected solution that enables a single version of the truth with a single-pass architecture that can post and report from the customer contract level detail. Having the detail eliminates the need for reconciliation. The solution turns financial statements into daily—rather than monthly—instruments of transparency and accountability. Control, audit, maintenance and support processes are concentrated rather than dissipated, resulting in better quality of intelligence at a lower cost.
Better decisions for a smarter enterprise
SAFR allows creation of a financial system architecture for the 21st century. The solution is a multi-component, integrated system that provides financial enterprises like yours with an innovative, modern, controlled, single source and common data repository for financial control as well as regulatory and management reporting. The solution can result in the following:
- Reduced finance system processing time and cycle time for reporting. This allows for changing reporting cycles from monthly or quarterly to daily, resulting in increased analysis and earlier detection of problems.
- Finance outputs that are more applicable to a larger segment of your organization, rather than focused on mandated but less meaningful regulatory or statutory reporting. This returns value to the business, rather than making finance appear as a stress on the organization.
Both of these points are critical to appropriately managing market and operational risk. Single failures in financial reporting can have catastrophic impacts on share prices.
A smarter and stronger platform for financial reporting
The SAFR solution can be made possible only with the inherent architectural strengths of the IBM® System z® platform. SAFR can run during prime time with minimal effect on your online systems. And it can run during off hours, generating massive amounts of standard reports efficiently within your batch window. It requires the following hardware and software components:
- IBM System z9® or IBM System z10™
- IBM z/OS® V1.8 or later
- IBM DB2® for z/OS or DB2 for Linux®, UNIX® and Windows® V8 or later (for use as a metadata repository and optionally as a data source)
- z/OS DFSORT™ or equivalent
In addition to making good use of traditional System z resources, SAFR can offload standard CPU cycles to the System z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP). By doing so, SAFR can make batch reporting workloads very cost-effective.