The collapse of Northern Rock in 2007 was a memorable moment for Joe Di Rollo, not only because it signalled the beginning of the financial meltdown that would spread around the world; it also marked a step-change in the fortunes of ALMIS® International.
Continue reading this interview between Joe Di Rollo and Daily Business here.
Edinburgh Wednesday 11th August 2021: ALMIS® International, the Edinburgh-based asset liability and treasury management software developer, has announced the appointment of its first Chief Technical Officer to spearhead innovation and development for the regulatory compliance of banks and building societies.
Chris Smith, aged 42, has more than 20 years’ experience in solutions architecture, and software development infrastructure, joins ALMIS® International from Cegedim Healthcare Solutions, an innovative technology and services company providing management software suites to GP Surgeries and Pharmacies across the UK.
In recent years, there has been a steady increase in a global regulatory focus on technology and innovation as regulators look to shore up procedural compliance.
The company has positioned itself as one of the key software developers in this field and as Joe DiRollo, founder and managing director of ALMIS® International explains, the appointment of a Chief Technology Officer to oversee future incremental development of the product suite to comply with the regulatory demands placed on banks and building societies, helps ALMIS® maintain its position as a prominent corporate financial software developer.
He comments,
“We are delighted to welcome Chris Smith as ALMIS® International’s new Chief Technology Officer. “For some time, we have been searching for the right candidate who could drive through our medium to long term product development strategy. Chris comes with a wealth of knowledge and experience, creating and developing software in industries such as forestry and healthcare. He’ll be a strong addition to the team and provide the right balance of strategic thinking coupled with a practical hands-on approach to leading the developers and technical staff.”
Chris Smith said: “This is an exciting challenge and one that I am very much looking forward to. ALMIS® International is a hugely successful software firm operating in an area of the financial sector bound by extensive governance, risk, and compliance. This is a tremendous opportunity. I am very much looking forward to playing a key role in the future success of the company.”
The company is located in central Edinburgh and has a staff complement of 25 staff predominantly in development and technical support.
We’ve been busy over the last year or so and we’re hugely excited to tell you about our forthcoming software roll outs. This underlines our commitment to investing resources to make improvements that add value to your licences.
Our dedicated data platform, Middle Office+ is designed to give you a higher degree of flexibility when it comes to extracting and using your data. It has a wider and more sophisticated range of ETL tools which gives our Front Office modules the correct level of detail to run reports and functions. This enhanced data model offers you a data platform for both current and future ALM and regulatory reporting needs.
On 1 January 2022, the PRA’s Capital Requirements Regulation 2 (CRR2) will come into effect. This covers the Basel III reforms including the Pillar 1 Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR), new market risk requirements and the revised counterparty credit risk rules. We’ve developed updated versions of our ALMIS® Front Office and ALMIS® RR+ software to keep you compliant and these will be available over the coming months.
The first version, due to be released in the coming weeks, covers the NSFR changes that require banks to have stable funding to support their lending activities. We’ve developed this software in ALMIS® Front Office so it can seamlessly auto-populate the required templates in ALMIS® RR+ and work with the planning tool to forecast your NSFR exposure through the life of your corporate plan.
Shortly afterwards, our second ALMIS® Front Office release will address changes to the Standardised Approach to Counterparty Credit Risk calculations (SA-CCR). Each release will be followed up with a webinar to explain the new regulations and walk you through the new functionality.
This is so it will be compatible with the upcoming Taxonomy 3.0 templates. All of our UK bank and building society clients will need this update to comply with the regulatory reporting requirements that come into effect on 1 January 2022. The latest ALMIS® RR+ version will be released alongside the first CRR2 update so that the updated calculations will auto-populate into the regulatory reports.
Drop us a line at support@almis.co.uk and a member of our team will get in touch with you.
Joe Di Rollo
Founder and CEO of ALMIS® International
We’ve made a few changes at ALMIS® International to grow the business and improve the services we offer our clients.
This suite of solutions is the software of choice for over half of the building societies and many banks in the UK. Our Cobalt® Treasury Management System seamlessly integrates with ALMIS®. Because Regulatory Reporting is such an increasingly important requirement for companies, we’ve re-engineered our module from the ground up as a standalone solution in Front Office +. It’s fast, easily maintained and supports multiple taxonomies. Our aim is to make it the best Regulatory Reporting software on the market. As regulators look to get data more easily from banks, the question is, can you afford not to have it? And Middle Office +, a dedicated platform application for all balance sheet management, will be formally launched this year.
We’re constantly improving the quality of our products so that we get things right first time. By embedding this process in the whole system, we can be more focused, transparent and responsive to our clients. Over the last few years there has been more focus on information security and banking regulations around out-sourcing to the cloud. With these considerations in mind, we’re testing towards ISO27001 on recovery and resolution on ALMIS® Cloud. We deliver this service in partnership with Microsoft Azure and nearly two thirds of our clients have switched to our hosting platform.
Colin Johnson, Chief Product Officer, will now look after the client facing services while John Muir, our Chief Operating Officer, continues to focus on products and internal delivery. This includes our upgraded hosting platform, ALMIS® Cloud, and a new independent testing department led by our Quality Assurance Manager, Georgina Macleod.
We’ve also taken on eight new hires, four of whom are on our Graduate Training Programme. We also invest in training and our Senior Financial System Analyst, Luke Di Rollo, has become the first person in the company to complete the ALMA CertBALM® qualification. Scott MacLennan, our Financial System Analyst, is starting the course in March.
Virtual User Group Meetings in January 2021
Due to COVID we could not hold our usual annual gathering this year and as we look forward to 2021, in addition to our webinars, we are holding 4 product updates for giving software users development updates, and for users to share experiences and future requirements. Please register for the sessions you wish attend. Please note these are client only events.
• Latest developments
• Roadmap
• User feedback
• IRRBB, 6 shocks and an annual EVE measure, impact of near to zero and negative rates
• PRA 110 and Liquidity Management
• New CRR2 developments – a new NSFR and a look at the changes to RWA calcs, large exposures and CVA
• User feedback
• What’s new
• Customer experiences
• Product Update
• User feedback
• Where we are, and how we are getting on upgrading clients to MO+.
• How to get started with MO+
• MO+ and Power BI
UK and European Banks should now be managing IRRBB in compliance with the EBA Guidelines. In particular banks should be calculating EVE (a form of Economic Value) from the six prescribed parallel and non-parallel interest rate shock scenarios. The recently enhanced ALMIS® software delivers an automated solution to these Standardised Interest Rate Shocks, making it straightforward to comply with the quarterly test.
The guidelines apply numerous requirements to a bank’s IRRBB risk policies, processes and controls and detailed requirements for the bank’s ‘IRRBB IT system’. Unsurprisingly, the system needs the capability to calculate economic value and earnings-based measures of IRRBB, as well as other measures of IRRBB prescribed by regulators. Other more specific system requirements are complemented by requirements aimed at data quality and integrity. It is hard to envisage achieving compliance with these system requirements without an appropriate ALM solution. A look at how the six standardised interest rate shocks (‘SIRS’) are applied further demonstrates that case …
In calculating the impacts of the shocks a bank should in particular apply a list of stated principles which cover a range of topics, for example:
Banks should perform the calculations at least quarterly as prescribed in the guidelines.
where a decline in EVE exceeds 15% of Tier 1 capital under any of the scenarios the bank must inform its regulator (in addition the measurement should be included in the ICAAP).
ALMIS® International has for some time offered a SIRS solution. In the latest in our series of ALMIS® International Bank ALM client webinars, the enhanced version of the ALMIS® SIRS solution was demonstrated to clients.
The ALMIS® SIRS tool is an out the box solution, providing banks with easy to use functionality which eliminates manual processes. The software generates the required curves automatically from a single risk-free curve and then calculates and reports the EVE impact for each of the 19 prescribed time buckets for each shock. Impacts on capital and outlier test compliance are included in the suite of standard reports (including separate Basel and EBA reports).
For further information or to arrange a brief demo, please contact us on: info@almis.co.uk
UK-based bank financial risk management software developer ALMIS® International today announces the appointment of its non-executive director Colin Johnson to a new executive role as Chief Product Officer.
Colin, who joins from Charter Court Financial Services where he was Head of Prudential Risk, will bring extensive ALM experience, especially in interest rate and liquidity risk.
On Colin’s appointment ALMIS® International CEO and Founder Joe Di Rollo commented: “Bank Asset Liability Management remains at the core of our offering, and Colin’s expertise in the area is widely recognised, so we’re delighted to bring him into the team in this new executive role..…”
Prior to his most recent role Colin worked in senior roles within Santander UK and Lloyds Banking Group, having previously spent 10 years managing treasury, ALM and liquidity issues within the Building Society sector. For several years he was also the Chairman of ALMA, an industry wide association covering ALM risks across the UK Banking and Building Society sectors. In that role Colin was instrumental in ALMA’s development of CertBALM, the industry recognised benchmark qualification in Bank and Building Society ALM.
ALMIS® International, founded in 1992 by Joe Di Rollo, identified the need for an Asset Liability Management system to calculate total balance sheet interest rate risk. Since then, the ALMIS® system has been developed into a comprehensive, flexible and regulatory compliant system offering ALM, regulatory reporting and hedge accounting solutions. In 2017 the company launched its Treasury Management System Cobalt® which integrates with ALMIS®.
ALMIS International is delighted to announce the launch of its new RegTech solution, FO+ Regulatory Reporting. Re engineered from the ground up, this new application features dynamic taxonomy selection, is more efficient and, in time, will support additional categories of regulatory returns. This innovative application enables the software to support new taxonomies efficiently.
The user experience is enhanced, with flexible grids offering Excel-type functionality such as expanding/collapsing rows and reordering columns. Validating, recalculating and importing/exporting to Excel is more performant than in the previous version of ALMIS® Front Office.
This new regulatory reporting application is designed to integrate seamlessly with clients’ existing ALMIS® set ups.
| We welcomed 50 delegates from 31 Banks and Building Societies to our event in Leicester on 20th-21st of November 2019. |
It was a good opportunity to learn more about our solutions, discuss future developments and network with industry peers.
We were delighted to announce that a PostgreSQL compatible version of FO+ RR is now available for Regulatory Reporting module clients. Installation documentation and guide will be circulated to relevant clients separately.
Delegates Feedback
“Very useful overview of new features & topical issues”
“Good to meet other users & nice to put faces to names for those that work in ALMIS”
“Topics were very well structured & covered all relevant features”
“All sessions were very informative and detailed, especially FO+:RR®and MO+®”
“The event was fabulous. I hope to receive an invitation to the event for next year.”
“Informative, detailed and well delivered, see you next year!”
At ALMIS® International we have been developing our software solutions continuously for over a quarter of a century. In 2019 the pace of our development activity has moved up a gear, in particular with two key developments which will both reach launch in Q3/Q4:-
These two key developments flow from some of the most fundamental elements of our ongoing product development strategy:-
Available for early adopters from September 2019 (roll-out the rest of our clients from October) FO+: RR is the brand-new system in which all new regulatory taxonomies will be developed. In addition to the functionality of our existing regulatory reporting module, FO+: RR will support multiple taxonomies simultaneously, will allow viewing the contents of XBRL files, will work faster, and operates on a dedicated SQL database. Clients will be invited to participate in an introductory webinar in early October. After release, FO+: RR will be developed to support a wider range of regulatory returns (incl. BoE statistical).
View more on Front Office +: Regulatory Reporting here.
After sustained effort over several years, through specification, design, development and testing, we are excited to bring the first truly dedicated bank data platform to the market. Built upon a new data model developed specifically for modern bank balance sheet management, MO+ offers various benefits including:-
View more on Middle Office + here.
The roll out of these key new developments of course comes at the same time as various other major developments for ALMIS®/Cobalt® clients this year, including the roll out of our New ALMIS® Hosted platform. This is all part of our determination to offer clients the best comprehensive offering of ALM and related solutions in the domestic market.