Overview

To enhance financial reporting capabilities for an investment bank, CrossCountry Consulting’s Data Transformation & Analytics experts led a holistic transformation of the bank’s process and systems architecture. By moving away from manual, error-prone systems like Excel and rebuilding the core data management and technology infrastructure, the team generated substantial time and cost savings, consolidated and centralized data, and measurably enhanced process efficiencies.

Expertise delivered

  • Purpose-built automations
  • Systems selection and implementation
  • Standardized reporting framework
  • Data centralization
  • Program and project management
  • Dashboarding and data visualizations

Challenge 

A multinational investment bank and financial services company faced pressing data and reporting infrastructure difficulties that were compounding by the day. Most immediately, the company needed enhanced reporting processes for its Transfer Pricing and Legal Entity teams. 

However, reporting was static, error-prone, and time-consuming because stakeholders relied on manual data extraction and heavy use of Excel. The company also lacked a standardized reporting framework, resulting in inconsistent reporting templates and poor documentation. 

Without the right technology and process architecture, key teams had limited visibility and virtually no value-add insights or ability to adapt to future reporting demands. Change was imperative. 

How We Helped 

CrossCountry Consulting’s Data Transformation & Analytics team facilitated the full lifecycle of the system selection and implementation process. To start, the team engaged key stakeholders throughout the bank’s business to gather requirements, understand all inputs, and ideate best-fit solutions. 

From these collaborative discussions emerged a target state that could solve the core problems the bank was facing, powered by a tech stack of Alteryx, Tableau, Power Query, and Shared Directories. CrossCountry built the business case for tech stack optimization featuring the selected tools and, once approved, fully implemented the plan and associated process changes using a proprietary program management methodology. 

With new infrastructure in place, the bank had made a significant leap forward in enterprise data management, cross-functional reporting capabilities, and meaningful analytics. The work didn’t end with go-live, however. 

To ensure the bank was equipped to maintain process integrity, leverage newly deployed automations, and capitalize on centralized financial reporting far into the future, CrossCountry conducted knowledge transfers and trainings, enabling a seamless handoff and business continuity. 

Results 

Every month, the bank is now processing 2.5-3 million general ledger records for: 

  • 4 regions. 
  • 40+ countries of incorporation. 
  • 10+ divisions. 
  • 35+ business units. 
  • 875+ legal entities. 
  • 5,000+ general ledger accounts. 
  • 22,000+ profit centers. 

The speed and efficiency gained had incredibly positive results, equating to 900 labor hours per month saved.  

New workflows allow data to be tagged with supplemental reporting information and can also aggregate data from non-centralized sources. The master dataset is now used as the foundation for: 

  • 70+ business dashboards. 
  • 260+ active global users. 
  • 20,000+ annual views. 

The short- and long-term wins generated from the engagement will have cascading effects throughout the entire business and provide a profitable foundation for continuous optimization, which CrossCountry is committed to support.