European Central Bank Picks Treasury Management Tech Provider

According to a press release Wednesday (May 16), the European Central Bank (ECB), based in Germany, has chosen OpenLink to provide treasury and risk management technology to manage its euro-dominated investment portfolio, foreign reserves and other asset purchase programs.

OpenLink’s EMEA Chief Revenue Officer Bernard Delahaye in a statement, “We are proud to collaborate with the ECB as it further enhances its risk and treasury operations for the Eurosystem. OpenLink is deeply committed to helping to ECB and other central banks evolve in step with regulatory changes, the need for advanced reporting and data analytics, and other market shifts.”

According to the ECB, public financial institutions are facing increasing challenges in compliance and reporting. At the same time, they’re challenged to manage growing volumes of data while implementing technologies to facilitate straight-through processing, due diligence, stress tests and risk checks.

Last year, OpenLink Vice President of Commodities & Treasury Solutions Mark O’Toole spoke with FX-MM about the intersection of Big Data and treasury management, noting that managing data for real-time risk mitigation is “a bigger challenger than you would imagine.”

“From a technology point of view,” he told the publication, “I think what corporates and banks are ultimately looking for is a real-time enterprise view of liquidity, and to be able to perform stress testing and behavioral scenario analyses on that data. Once you have that data, you need to be able to run advanced analytics at a granular level, to slice and dice that data right down to the what, when and where to discover how a certain transaction is affecting liquidity risk.”

Last year the ECB announced plans to request banks across the eurozone to reserve more cash to cover bad bank loans, Reuters reported in October. According to the bank, bad loans were offsetting the ECB’s low interest rate stimulus.