Company Profile

 

Barclays Bank is a global financial services provider with an extensive presence in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. In this interview, Innocent Scio, Applications Manager at Barclays, discusses how the organization, with the support of KPMG Kenya Advisory Services, analyzes millions of records daily using IDEA® to quicken accounts reconciliations and perform data quality remediation across 13 African countries.

“Barclays trusts IDEA; it uses it for its Daily Reconciliation. Its capabilities are endless.”

Innocent Scio, Applications Manager, Barclays Bank of Kenya

 

Interview: IDEA for Banking

 

Caseware: How does Barclays Bank of Kenya currently use IDEA?

Innocent: Barclays Bank of Kenya made the business decision to use IDEA Server analytics for our internal accounts reconciliations. We currently run 400,000 records daily to reconcile our accounts. We are also using IDEA in a Pan-African project analyzing reports from 13 countries where we collect 8–12 million records per day and perform data quality remediation.

 

Caseware: How did you first use IDEA?

Innocent: Barclays started using IDEA to make comparisons on various data sets. After that we started using the tool for data preparation, and we were able to compare 800,000 records with more than 30 fields and get accurate reports.

 

Caseware: What impact has IDEA had at Barclays?

Innocent: Besides accounts reconciliations, we use IDEA to compare customer data, product details and even account details and balances. We stopped calling IDEA a tool as it has become an integral part of Barclays’ system. Barclays trusts IDEA because its capabilities are virtually endless.

 

Caseware: What’s next for IDEA at Barclays?

Innocent: We have other business processes that are considering the use of IDEA. A good example is the Credit Reference Bureau (CRB) Reporting process for both our Retail and Corporate divisions.