Customer focused strategies that enable firms to meet today’s risk, regulatory and data management challenges: AxiomSL

Alex Tsigutkin, Founder and CEO – AxiomSL

Founded by Alexander Tsigutkin in 1991 and headquartered in New York, AxiomSL is the leading enterprise risk management and regulatory reporting provider serving the financial services
industry and technology partners such as Oracle and their clients.

AxiomSL’s clients include many global Tier One banking institutions, as well as an array of Tier Two banks, asset managers, broker dealers and insurers that it serves from offices in London, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Medellin and Sao Paulo.

Following the global financial crisis, AxiomSL empowers firms to meet evolving and new compliance requirements and manage growing operational costs with a dynamic platform addressing regulatory, risk and data management challenges. AxiomSL’s change management platform not only aggregates and enriches source data across the entire enterprise, but also enables financial firms to implement the processes and controls to successfully navigate through the maze of regulatory complexities, as well as, attests to the accuracy of the reports. This integrated platform delivers traceability, transparency and greater clarity about the organization’s financial position and risk exposure while producing timely reports with the analytics required by regulators and internal management demands.

One key distinction for AxiomSL—with its 25 years’ experience and deep domain expertise— is that its robust platform is agnostic to both system type and data format. While focusing on global and regional solutions for our clients, AxiomSL provides the flexibility to interface with products from the largest tech companies in the world, including Oracle, to ensure compliance with multiple regulatory mandates and external and internal reporting.

“We maintain strategic development alliances with audit, financial and technology industry leaders, financial data providers, hardware, and analytical software providers to guarantee that our clients receive both the best breed and a flawless implementation of their IT and business requirements,” Alex Tsigutkin says. “We believe coupling a change management platform with client-focused strategies is the key to success.”

Working with Oracle
One recent project completed with Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications (OFSAA) and a mutual global banking client demonstrated how AxiomSL collaborates in just that way.

In this case, AxiomSL was brought in as the regulatory reporting solution and data management specialist to address a number of challenging gaps, stemming from the client’s data normalization needs. These gaps included data conversions, annualizing averages into rates, and pulling of data which did not fit cleanly into a “Star”– style dimensional modeling schema. In addition, AxiomSL was used as a front end to analyze the Data model and to perform data quality assessment and variance analysis.

AxiomSL was able to work around these limitations, providing the mapping and standardization necessary to successfully achieve the bank’s required conversions and analysis. By setting up this process at the final reporting layer, rather than breaking down the data warehouse, both the implementation cost and operational challenges associated with the project were minimized.

Customer Focus: CEO Q&A
Alex Tsigutkin speaks regularly at both technology and financial services conferences, addressing topics such as dealing with changes in regulatory and risk management, achieving transparency and data lineage/governance across the enterprise, implementing controls & processes, data warehouse and financial firms regulatory challenges.

Conversely, the CEO notes that advising senior management and database engineers on a variety of projects has helped bring new ideas back to AxiomSL as it continues to address the expanding risk management and compliance standards. Here are a few additional thoughts from Alex.

Q. Can you tell us about how your firm is positioned in the contemporary regulatory environment?
A. AxiomSL’s change management platform meets both the latest and ongoing regulatory reforms. The platform’s unique approach aggregates and enriches data from various core financial and risk applications without any data conversion, allowing for greater efficiency and leveraging on existing workflows and processes. It provides multidimensional analysis capabilities via disaggregation of an entire portfolio’s risks and exposures, isolating those components to the lowest level of granularity while supporting multiple submission formats including XBRL.

Financial organizations are dealing with a slew of regulatory mandates, such as Basel III reporting rules, BCBS 239 Principles, Comprehensive Capital Adequacy Review (CCAR), liquidity and stress testing requirements, IFRS 9, FRTB, net capital calculations for broker dealers and many more. Strong IT infrastructure providing data lineage, automated workflow, analytics, reconciliation and other business functions is a crucial need for firms facing these mandates today.

Q. How does one distinguish your offerings from that of your competitors? What is the added advantage that one can enjoy by using AxiomSL’s platform and services?
A. Many of the new reporting requirements our clients face imply operational and technical complexities that can be both expensive and time-consuming to properly engineer and manage over time, with millions of data points lying across dozens of legacy systems. Our platform steps in and acts as an integration layer, implemented with minimal internal disruption and without a “black box” mentality.

In addition to our core risk data aggregation capabilities, the platform combines deep domain expertise with new innovation to provide clients the depth of information, access, and controls required in today’s operating environment.Today, this innovation includes efficient task execution, sophisticated dashboards, user interface tools, and permissioning among other focus areas.

The industry press has long recognized our efforts in the marketplace by bestowing numerous rankings and awards upon us (both judged and voted upon directly by our clients). Most recently, we were awarded “Best Compliance Risk Technology Implementation of the year” by The Asian Banker and also the “Best Implementation at a Sell Side firm” by Waters Technology and last year, we received the “Customer Satisfaction Award in RiskTech”.

“We believe coupling a change management platform with client-focused strategies is the key to success”