Integrated financial supervision system supports Bank of Ghana reforms

In the last three years The Bank of Ghana, led by its new Governor Dr Ernest Addison, has dramatically transformed through policy and banking sector reforms, from closing failed banks to winning the Central Bank of the Year in 2020. 

As Dr Addison explains, by revoking licences of weak and insolvent institutions, and a revamp of the regulatory framework to stabilise and strengthen the sector.  

“Our banks are now well capitalised, liquid, solvent, and resilient to liquidity and credit risk and well-positioned to support Ghana’s economic growth agenda”, he said while accepting the Central Bank of the Year award.  

The Challenge

The task of cleaning up Ghana’s banking sector and restoring confidence in the banking system was a significant challenge.  

“Following the clean-up, which was completed in August 2019, we focused our attention on strengthening our regulatory framework to address gaps and weakness identified and making our supervisory structures and processes more robust while strengthening the capacity of our supervisory staff”, says Mrs Elsie Addo Awadzi, Second Deputy Governor, Bank of Ghana. 

Alongside the bank’s management and expert teams, technology was a significant driver of change. 

The Solution 

A fully integrated financial surveillance system was key to strengthening the Bank of Ghana’s regulatory framework and increasing efficiencies.  

The Vizor SupTech Platform, called ORASS (Online Regulatory and Analytical Surveillance Software) by the bank, enables the regulator to consolidate and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the data it collects and ensure consistency across departments.  

The Central Bank now has a single portal to collect prudential data from banks and deposit-taking institutions. It also centralises the data from all the departments into one solution, which will improve their reporting and analytical capabilities. 

The bank also uses Vizor, now part of Regnology, to streamline the management, review and approval of licence and authorisation requests from reporting entities.   

The platform “helped us to manage our prudential data collection and the licensing of financial institutions. Our regulated entities can now upload their data automatically via API, decreasing the amount of human interaction when submitting data.” Michael Mensah, Director of ICT, Bank of Ghana.

The Benefits

The Bank of Ghana has already realised significant benefits through the use of our supervisory solution.  

• Improved quality, consistency, reliability and integrity of data submitted to and published by the Central Bank.  
• Financial institutions can easily integrate their own customised reporting applications with the Central Bank’s Online Regulatory Analytic Surveillance System. 
• Providing supervisors with insightful surveillance reports immediately based on collected data, along with business intelligence reports from the data warehouse. 
• Enhanced monitoring and supervision on both a standalone and consolidated basis to quickly identify inherent risks within the financial system and proactively determine supervisory, regulatory and policy decisions/actions. 
• Significant decreases in the time and cost required to implement new regulatory requirements over time through the use of the Builder self-service tool. 
• The Risk-Based Supervision module greatly assists the Bank of Ghana in compliance with Basel Capital Accords and other international regulatory requirements.

The Details
Regular Returns

• The Bank of Ghana consolidated all data collections across the different supervisory departments into 42 Returns with over 250 forms and over 400 validation rules.
   

Licensing and Transactions

• Bank of Ghana consolidated 3 Supervisory Departments Licensing Requirements into 1 set of common transactions. 11 additional licensing forms added into existing VLRT structure which contains approximately 1000 data points. 8 additional custom transaction returns specific to Ghana jurisdiction containing approx. 300 data points. Approx. 300 data points stored in the Corporate Profile. 44 Power BI Reports, each consisting of multiple dashboards and visuals covering a range of Regulatory Return Data. Includes Operational Reports as well as Management Reports.

Risk-based Supervision

• 103 KRI’s Across 7 Risk Areas (Quantitative). 105 Onsite Control Questions across 8 Risk Areas (Qualitative). These combined together form a comprehensive Risk Profile per Institution.

Are you interested in hearing more about our supervisory solutions? Book a demo today to talk to our expert team.