Cross organizational standardized business process integration and its application in Saudi Arabian banking system regulation: A case study of advanced IRB regulation

Abstract

The idea for this paper came after the recent financial crisis, its global consequences and specifically how it affected the banking sector. Financial institutions and regulators are – from a technical point of view - not fully integrated and automated yet. The inaccuracy in banks’ data and the long set interval period, quarterly, to send the information to the regulators leads to delays interventions by local supervisory regulators. Most of the banks are using an Internal Ratings Based (IRB) approach that allows them to use their own methods to calculate the credit risks, which makes it difficult for the regulators to verify and validate the banks’ data without adopting fully automated connectivity for the regulatory reporting system through sophisticated tools. The importance of this issue, for the central banks as well as the global economy, encourages us to investigate and to find solutions for the problem at hand. This paper is focused on the Advanced Internal Ratings Based (A-IRB) approach to evaluate credit risk due to the importance and the sensitivity of this approach on the banking sector. The flexibility of the A-IRB approach allow banks to use their own method to calculate the credit risk without regulators having the right tools to validate the data is a major issue . The second issue with the A-IRB approach is that the report is only delivered quarterly to the regulator (SAMA). This period is too long as decisions can be taken based on data that is almost a quarter old. Therefore, evaluating the existing framework and solving the issues concurrently is essential to improve the regulatory reporting system. To examine the situation of the regulatory reporting system, first, we reviewed literature on the Basel II&III regulations and the financial crisis, including impacts and responses. The second, we reviewed   factors impeding the implementation of Basel II&III, including solutions to increase coordination and integration and a holistic approach that can mitigate the outstanding issues for the Regulatory Reporting System for the local banks in Saudi Arabia. We also evaluated the current system and the proposed system in two workshops and found that the proposed system showed considerable improvements of more than 100% in some areas and hence should be implemented. Our result is a framework solution that integrates a private cloud computing network with automated and integrated features such as a Business Process Manager, a Knowledge Management Engine, a SLA Lifecycle Manager, a Business Rules Engine and a Data Quality Regulator and the Enterprise Service Bus for communication and integration between the banks and SAMA. 

Keywords: Business Process, Business Rules, Bank Management