Financial Services
Europe
Santander Bank is a leading finance group in Poland in terms of assets. It offers financial solutions to individuals, micro-, small and medium enterprises as well as Polish and international corporations.
Like all banks, Santander is subject to the BION assessment aimed at identifying the scale and types of risk the bank is faced with, evaluating the quality of risk management, evaluating the size of the capital set aside to cover risks related to the bank’s activities and management.
One aspect of the BION assessment is the sizeable annual self-assessment forms for risk management, sent in by the Polish Financial Supervisory Authority (PFSA).
The self-assessment forms for banks comprise 13 Excel spreadsheets containing a total of more than 600 questions.
These questions pertain to the majority of key areas of bank operations, and so providing reliable final answers requires the involvement and work of a dozen, or even several dozen, personnel.
A major challenge for the person tasked with coordinating the process is thus directing the questions to the relevant divisions, ensuring proper and timely responses are returned, collating these in a final version of the spreadsheet and acquiring approvals from all parties involved. This is necessarily time-consuming and poses difficulties in monitoring progress, which leads to work accumulating until last minute.
For personnel involved in preparing the actual answers the key challenge is submitting for approval the best information possible, before the deadline, ensuring consistency with answers given in the past, and across the entire spreadsheet.