ProfitStars Manages Risk by Managing the Exceptions

In financial services, complexity is the rule. As a result, risk comes in all shapes and sizes.

In financial services, complexity is the rule. As a result, risk comes in all shapes and sizes. To address this complex risk, Dallas-based ProfitStars (booth 1706), a division of Jack Henry & Associates, has developed the Enterprise Exception Management Suite (EEMS), the latest version of which it is showcasing at this year's SIA Technology Management Conference.

Designed to mitigate the risks associated with financial and operational data transfer and reconciliation, EEMS can be tailored to fit a wide array of processes within a financial services organization, according to Glen Miller, senior development manager for the EEMS group at ProfitStars. "Our product is based on a model of defining these processes in a component-based fashion and reusing those components across different processes," he says. "One of our differentiators is the ability to, in effect, configure virtually any risk management solution with our product."

EEMS has a basic framework that works on modest hardware - two servers, each with 2.4 GHz processors - on which ProfitStars can build a risk mitigation solution using what it calls "solution accelerators," Miller relates. Solution accelerators essentially are templates that are customized to meet the needs of each individual client, he explains. The solutions built on this framework consequently share a common data infrastructure that facilitates the passing of data along multiple solutions, processes, business lines or products. "It allows you to tie together these solutions in a way that will, in effect, let you do end-to-end risk management across an entire activity," says Miller.

This configurability is essential to EEMS because of the differences of the generation and subsequent mitigation of risk from business to business. "We can walk into any organization that is doing exactly the same process with exactly the same data, but it's doing it totally differently - that's because organizations grow organically," asserts Miller.

Common uses of the EEMS framework include compliance, reconciliation and business intelligence, Miller notes. With regard to compliance, EEMS offers the ability to track and monitor key risk indicators, and automate actions and notifications for any noncompliance transaction or activity, he continues. The suite also can perform data reconciliation and exception management according to any institution's individual business rules. Further, data access, query and reporting, and analytic capabilities deliver business intelligence about operational risk and corporate performance, Miller adds.