Banking & Capital Markets

Progressive digitization and regulatory change together with an intensifying market and competitive climate in the banking environment require operational excellence. You can benefit from the expertise and experience of a consulting firm whose core competence lies in the technical, methodical, procedural and technical aspects of commercial and retail banking. From the risk assessment of individual debtors and their collateral through to dynamic pricing approaches and the implementation of modular credit factories, d-fine personalises support and consultation with tailor-made solutions that meet the highest of standards. In addition to model development and independent validation, d-fine also covers all aspects of customer administration, architecture design and implementation.

Modern, efficient banking operations with scalable processes and systems are key to reducing your cost/income ratio and to achieving sustainable success in a low-margin and highly competitive market environment. Our consulting services for operations address your strategic, professional and technical issues in operating the core bank, trading and payment transactions. We assist you with outsourcing your securities processing. We connect your inventory management systems to modern payment infrastructures. We automate your processes and map them into your core banking system. We digitize your bank: from low-code process digitisation to crypto custody.

d-fines risk management expertise incorporates valuation models, credit risk, market risk incl. interest rate risk, liquidity risk, operational risk and cross-risk challenges such as stress testing, ICAAP, ILAAP and model risk. Its portfolio of services ranges from the implementation of standard procedures and internal models for determining capital requirements through to the development of appropriate methods for internal management and compliance with disclosure requirements. In addition, d-fine specialises in dealing with non-financial risks such as climate risk, behavioural risk, cyber risk and business risk. Both the recording and active management of these is becoming increasingly important for our clients. Our experts’ support makes use of appropriate tools for model development and calibration, benchmarking and validation.

Growing pressure on margins and ever more stringent external reporting obligations are placing significant demands on the financial sector. Alongside knowledge of relevant standards such as local GAAP and IFRS, an in-depth understanding of measurement techniques, and of the associated data, are key to success. We support our clients in both analysing the impact and implementation of accounting standards, in the development and implementation of effective hedge accounting solutions, execution of indicative measurements and purchase price allocations as part of takeover transactions. In the area of bank-wide management, we work with our clients to improve existing planning processes – in particular, taking into account the latest technological data platforms. And of course, we take a holistic view of coordinating and exploiting synergies to adjacent areas such as reporting or analytical asset liability management.

The ongoing and ever-faster development of banking and capital market regulations not only means that a growing number of standards have to be met, but new qualitative requirements are also constantly appearing. In this respect, aspects such as the model-based assessment of capital equity requirements in the market and credit risk, transaction-based reporting in the capital market business and reports based on individual data, can only be achieved by being able to rely on methodological competence, efficient process and IT architecture design and high-quality data management. In addition to the already very extensive requirements for regulation & compliance, the next major challenges for the banking sector are already emerging with the iReF and BIRD initiatives which aim to harmonise reporting on a European level. In the area of securities and money laundering compliance, we rely on our in-depth regulatory understanding and our methodological, process and IT know-how. These are the core competences of d-fine.

The implementation of the EU Green Deal requires the alignment of private sector investment in sustainable economic activities. In this context, the EU is currently pushing ahead with the implementation of the EU taxonomy – in the classification of banking products as well as a comprehensive expansion of sustainability reporting obligations for financial and real economy companies. Amongst other aspects, non-financial reporting according to the NFRD will be replaced by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which means that a comprehensive sustainability report according to EU Sustainability Reporting Standards will have to be prepared. The group of companies required to submit reports will be increased by a factor of 30 to approx. 15,000 companies in Germany alone. Furthermore, credit institutions are required to publish additional ESG information within the framework of Pillar III. We are happy to discuss this dynamic topic area with you, starting with data collection in the business process, the classification logic of the taxonomy and the integration of the information into existing data management up to the European Single Access Point (ESAP) and the machine-readable format ESEF.

Our IT specialists offer support not only in terms of traditional IT projects, but also in your bank’s digitization process. We work with you to develop a sustainable and expandable IT and software architecture always with an eye on IT regulation, governance and security. We provide you with advice on the selection of standard software or develop turnkey, individual solutions for you, scripted in C/C++, Java or Python and using standardised components such as Oracle, MS SQL Server, Ab Initio or Angular.

We support the entire IT life cycle, from requirements analysis through to maintenance and operation. In all this, we are technology agnostic, modernising decades-old, specialized applications in C as well as building new solutions with big data technologies in Apache Kafka and Flink. We use agile methods and have successfully implemented projects involving more than 10,000 person days.

The topic of outsourcing is an important part of the strategy of financial institutions to ensure cost-efficient banking operations with scalable processes and systems and to promote access to expertise and knowledge of external service providers and FinTechs. In this context, we support our clients in the implementation of outsourcing elements along the entire value chain together with the banking processes required for this. In doing so, we always keep an eye on the respective regulatory framework conditions for the specific outsourcing facts. In addition, d-fine offers services for the outsourcing of specific banking expertise. In risk controlling, for example, we take on the development and regular maintenance of rating models as well as the regular preparation of validation reports.