How Berenberg Transformed Profit Center Reporting with Business Rules from Corticon

Digital transformation isn’t just changing how people manage their money. It’s changing how banks like the Hamburg-based Berenberg manage theirs as well.

As one of the oldest private banking institutions in the world, Berenberg is constantly evaluating its profit centers to ensure the delivery of high-quality services to customers. Historically, this was done using several different complex data processing systems, enhanced by sophisticated calculations performed in Microsoft Access and Excel.

Several years of growth as well as rapid changes to the digital landscape led to major shifts in profit center accounting.

Not only was the volume of data traffic skyrocketing, data aggregation itself was growing more complex.

The risk management department within Berenberg quickly realized the company needed to transform its risk management reporting. This would enable the financial institution to automate report creation and ensure accurate profit center accounting.

However, checking the underlying data used to create the reports was extremely time consuming. With over 70 reports created every month, Berenberg’s analysts often dedicated hours of their day to reviewing the results of the reports to confirm their veracity.

It was clear Berenberg needed to decrease the amount of time spent manually correcting reports. At the same time, the institution also needed to be mindful of data aggregation and reporting requirements set forth by the BCBS-239 regulation. 

Berenberg was already planning significant changes to its data infrastructure. This provided the perfect opportunity to implement a business rules management system (BRMS) to help validate the reports. With the right BRMS, Berenberg would be able to…

• Automate accrual postings
• Assess individual agreements with the associated allocations
• Allocate costs incurred at different cost centers
• Generate audit-proof reports

However, one unique requirement is that Berenberg wanted its analysts to be able to maintain the business rules powering this process themselves.

This was necessary to ensure the rules could be checked and changed as needed, and to keep the error rate low.

That’s when Berenberg’s business intelligence analyst Dr. Jörn Peter discovered Progress® Corticon®. 

By decoupling rule authoring from the application code, Corticon enables business analysts to work on business rules without relying on IT to implement everything before testing and iterating it. Corticon also features an intuitive Excel-like rule modeling interface that will feel familiar to many business analysts, helping them get up to speed even faster.

“Corticon is intuitive and doesn't give the impression that you are actually programming," Dr. Peter said.

Corticon needed to be implemented seamlessly to ensure the large number of data systems used for business rules could be queried quickly. Progress worked closely with Berenberg’s in-house team, resulting in a timely yet comprehensive implementation.