"The flexibility offered by the system is extensive. We have been able to digitize key workflows that previously existed across multiple internal and 3rd-party systems including spreadsheets and shared drives."

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About BPG

The bank was established over 22 years ago and operates as a universal bank, providing a broad range of products and services in retail, private, corporate and investment banking. The bank is focused on providing its solutions to the social economy sector (for instance, private charities and other not-for-profit organisations in the areas such as healthcare, education, childhood, seniors, special needs, social and professional insertion).

Few years ago. the bank embarked on a strategic plan that included:

• Balanced growth between domestic credit originated directly, credit originated by third parties in the national and international markets, financial services and portfolio of financial assets;
• Reinforcement of the governance model and the internal control system, involving reinforcement of teams and technological investments.

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Challenges

With an exciting strategy ahead, the BPG, as part of its wider digitization efforts, wanted to put together a robust framework of governance with comprehensive controls while also automating manual tasks related to risk and portfolio management.

Given the costs and constraints to build internally, BPG decided to implement the Alterest solution that provided everything they required for not only the strategy ahead but also with the view that this solution must continue to satisfy future plans, growth and expansion of the bank.

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Solution

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Strong Governance Model and Internal Control Systems

The bank's choice has always been to automate processes and proactively look out for manual workflows to optimize. With Alterest, the bank has automated the centralization of each and every loan and cashflow data point related to credit originated by third parties irrespective of their provenance. With complete granular historical information available instantly coupled with Alterest’s modelling capabilities, the bank has implemented tight data controls to assess the quality of each end borrower, their payment trends and monitor performance on a cashflow level. This provides complete loan look-through capability and an enhanced governance framework. Alterest enabled stringent monitoring of the underlying portfolio but also provided a way to identify, trace and rectify data quality issues.

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Auditing and Continuous Regulatory Compliance

The Alterest feeds module enabled the bank to collate all raw data files received from counter parties in one view. Along with this, a continuous historical view is available due to Alterest’s ability to intelligently stitch together data irrespective of ongoing changes in the templates.

Auditors and stakeholders are able to get temporary access to BPG’s Alterest portal to examine the comprehensive control and historical status available at all times. Previously this took several hours of preparatory work and numerous back and forth between stakeholders and file attachments.

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Automated Risk Management

The list of comprehensive checks and balances on the whole third-party credit portfolio is also configured to notify and alert users of breaches and unusual patterns through email messages complemented by access to detailed reports. BPG has achieved a high degree of risk management automation on granular controls immediately executed with any new information flowing in.

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Dedicated Support

Alterest dedicated customer support has augmented the platform’s rich capabilities with dedicated personnel domain-specific support who proactively collaborate with BPG to expand the applicability of the platform within its business and ensure customer success. “It’s like having your own dedicated quant team, at the fraction of cost and who are experts in data and analytics technology and also in credit modelling,” adds Joana Figueira, portfolio manager of BPG’s fintech portfolio.

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Confident Deployment

The bank has been able to confidently deploy capital with third-party originators, including during the pandemic, due to the strength of processes established using the Alterest platform. More importantly, The bank can further design and execute the digitization of workflows with Alterest for its wider business areas and new growth opportunities

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Key improvements

• 40 hours saved per month through automation
• 100% critical spreadsheet workflows replaced
• Loan-level look-through on a continuous basis‍
• Eliminated key-man risks
• Regulatory compliance automation
• Eliminated key-man risks