Industries

Financial Services

Financial institutions are judged on the quality of numbers they submit to somebody else. That makes the reporting layer, not the core system, the place where most of the operational risk actually sits.

The situation

What we usually find

For SACCOs, microfinance institutions, insurance intermediaries and investment firms whose regulatory reporting is assembled by hand each period.

The core system holds the member or policy records and does that job. What it rarely does well is produce the institution’s own management and regulatory accounts, so those get assembled in a spreadsheet each period by one or two people who understand the mapping — and understand it in their heads.

The calendar is unforgiving. Deposit-taking SACCOs file renewal applications by 30 September with three years of audited IFRS statements, and hold prudential ratios that are tested rather than estimated. SASRA gazettes the licensed list each January; the January 2026 notice licensed 176 institutions and restricted five to credit-only business for the year. Provisioning under IFRS 9 has to be forward-looking, which means the loan book has to be capable of being modelled, not just counted.

The exposure is concentration. When the mapping between the core system and the statutory return lives in one person’s working file, the institution has a reporting dependency it has never named as a risk — and it fails on the period after that person leaves, not before.

How the work flows

Where the pressure points are

Every business in this sector runs a version of this cycle. These are the points where it strains when the systems behind it do not join up — and where the value of joining them up shows first.

The Onboard to report cycle, and where it strains without joined-up systems. Onboard: Member and customer records captured twice, with the two versions diverging quietly. Transact: Core system balances that have to be manually agreed to the general ledger each period. Provision: Expected credit loss calculated in a workbook only one person can open with confidence. Report: Statutory returns rebuilt from scratch every cycle instead of produced. Audit: Weeks spent evidencing figures that should have been traceable to source all along.

Where we'd start

The first move

We would take your most recent regulatory return and trace three figures on it back to source. Where the trail runs through a spreadsheet, a manual journal or somebody’s knowledge, that is the finding — and it is usually enough to establish the scope of the work without a lengthy discovery exercise.

Where we are not the answer

We do not publish a core banking system, a SACCO management system or a policy administration platform, and we would not recommend replacing yours as an opening move. Our work is the finance, control and reporting layer around it, and the integration between them. If you are shopping for a new core system, we can help you evaluate it — but you should know we are not selling one.

Is this how your operation runs?

Tell us where it strains, and we will tell you plainly which of this is relevant to you and which of it is not — before you commit to anything.

Book an Assessment
Back to top