Bank of Ireland Treasury & International Banking Dublin has gone live with PaceMetrics’ PaceMaker and PaceManager products, as part of a broad straight-through-processing initiative. The PaceMetrics systems will help provide the bank with transaction data that can be used to increase operational efficiency and to manage operational risk.
The rollout of the live product follows hot on the heels of a pilot installation in January to prove the concept. Lorcan Connolly, IT director at the bank, says that the pilot project “provided a critical real-time lifecycle view of our overall trade-processing operations” with minimal impact on existing systems. “They provide our operations staff with the ability to monitor and manage exception trades early and effectively,” he says.
PaceMaker monitors the flow of a trade through its lifecycle, enabling staff to identify overdue events and avert errors. The Transaction Flow Monitor provides a monitor for end-to-end transaction management, while a module called the Operational Event Store (OES) records every event for every activity in the lifecycle of all transactions. This data is available for modelling operational risk exposure in processes and systems and can be linked to other databases within the organisation to enrich the data.
Head of operational risk at the bank, Michael Geraghty, has already felt the positive impact of PaceMetrics on operational risk management. He can see considerable scope for use in this area in other divisions of the bank.
“Not only do we get a view in real time of the entire processing across multiple systems, but we also gain a clean record of all events stored in the Operational Event Store,” he says. “The OES warehouses the entire history of all trades, including their events and states, enabling the business to proactively manage and report on operational risk.”
PaceManager provides the exception-processing mechanism and the link to reference data sources. Another module – the Business Process Executive (BPE) – proactively manages each trade through to settlement using workflow-like mechanisms to coordinate the components involved in the settlement of each trade. Interfacing to the enrichment component with the correct standing data from the reference data service, it ensures that each component has sufficient and correct static data to perform its task.
