HSBC Private Bank France uses ISIMAN® to publish procedures and charts of accounts HSBC Private Bank France, subsidiary of one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world, has been using ISIMAN to publish its knowledge base KFQua : Knowledge - Flow - Quality since February 2005.
Gaëlle Tokarski
"ISIMAN combines consistency and flexibilty"
Front Office and Back Office staff used to find collecting procedural information a long and arduous process. The documentation was neither completely up to date nor conformant with new legal requirements in terms of quality and security in the financial sector.
Accounting staff dealing with accounting diagrams defining the accounting movements entered or used in accounting software in various charts of accounts, had the same problem.
As a result, during the merger of the four private banks of the HSBC group in France, it was decided to take the opportunity to create a common knowledge base which would meet the needs of staff of the new HSBC Private Bank France. ISIMAN Processes and ISIMAN IAS/IFRS, were selected to document and cross reference charts of accounts and business procedures.
The knowledge base was installed in 2003 and set up with the assistance of Eurogroup for the procedures and Mazars for the charts of accounts.
During the merger in 2004 the ISIMAN knowledge base was used to validate the new business procedures and the accounting movements that they generated. The knowledge base structure was also modified to include evaluation of the risks generated by business procedures.
The first phase of the project consisted of detailed specification of the procedure descriptions and of the cross-references required with the accounting events. At the end of this phase, all aspects of the knowledge base and the resulting intranet had been customized (relational database data entry, intranet navigation and graphics). Once the technical writers were trained and common writing rules established, the knowledge base was worked on by the equivalent of 2 full-time people for 6 months with a part-time database administrator (20 % ). Process flowcharts are easy to draw, all the information is held in the knowledge base, so nothing can be overlooked.
A validation process was set up involving the people who would be updating and using the knowledge base. Such a knowledge base and intranet are only useful and only meet legal and HSBC Group standards if the information they publish is up to date. If any information is out of date, then the credibility of all the information published could be lost !.
The intranet was set up rapidly on the server for consultation by end users. According to their user profile and their working requirements, they can view all procedures and charts of accounts. Each end user has followed one hour's training including project objectives, intranet content and how to search for topics. Intranet use is increasing and end users are satisfied.
At the moment, the intranet holds 330 business procedures and 135 accounting procedures, with a planned total of 150 accounting diagrams, a general chart of accounts (867 account descriptions), a consolidation chart of accounts (94 account descriptions) and risks documented in relation to procedures.
To make things even easier for end users, a list of the latest new or updated topics is displayed in a pop up window when the end user logs on. The list can be sorted by several criteria, topic by topic.
The person responsible for inhouse procedures, Gaëlle Tokarski, sees the project as the means by which best practices can be disseminated and coordinated throughout the organisation, in accordance with banking and financial regulations and Group standards. This means an improvement in quality and controls and first steps, in the direction of better management of operational risks at an acceptable cost. It also provides a credible response to the ever-greater constraints imposed by external bodies.
