Improving our processes with automation

A winning as One Barclays story of enabling our colleagues to service the clients faster.

The Collateral management team manages margin money (collateral) from clients in order to manage credit risk. The team has complex margin arrangement on which it calculates the interest on collateral. In this case the team uses London Interbank Offer Rate (LIBOR) as the benchmark for setting the interest rate on collateral. This needs to be computed weekly and settled on a monthly basis.

Owing to the manual nature of interest calculation, the reset was happening monthly instead of weekly. Delay in resets resulted in incorrect interest accrual and in turn P&L variation of a couple of thousand pounds. This also impacted the issuance of interest statement to clients, which in ideal scenario had to happen on the first day of the month.

Delivering automated solution 
To fix the issue at hand, the Collateral and Margin services (CMS) team worked closely with Finance, Instrument and Price Master Data Management (IPMDM) Operations, Exposure Manager and Asset Control technology teams to create an automated solution that would make the processes more efficient, enabling our teams to service our clients quicker.

The improved process removed the need for manual intervention for interest calculations; this not only ensured a great client experience but also brought forth a huge positive impact on our Control environment.

In addition, accurate calculation of daily accruals eliminated huge P&L variations and improved the delivery of interest statement to our clients.

By improving the processing capacity and efficiency of the teams, it is directly benefiting our clients and successfully demonstrating our aim to make our customer lives easier.