Banking & Finance

Uni System’s flagship banking product, the bMASTER Enterprise Banking System, is a technologically advanced, innovative, packaged solution for Financial Institutions that provide minimum risk and low total cost of ownership. bMASTER Enterprise Banking System is a modular yet, seamlessly integrated core banking system, developed exclusively by Uni Systems. 

It covers a wide range of operations in the retail, corporate, and wholesale banking sectors. The coherence of the system is a strong benefit since it is not a mixture of third-party products. This minimizes the complexity of the solution, increases the components’ interoperability and functionality while minimizing any risks in delivering a comprehensive and integrated solution. Its’ flexible nature allows management to map the corporate strategy into the system, and through management decision-making tools, to monitor its execution.

The current, changing environment forces executives to rethink and radically change their business mindset and adjust business models to provide competitive services to customers.  uniBPM Business Process Management system is designed to fully digitize, automate, execute and monitor procedures carried out within the financial institution, reducing costs and increasing the overall resource efficiencies. Business users can create, monitor and modify process definitions that interact with systems and people, from within or outside the organization.

Product Studio envisioning and designing System is a complete, technologically advanced packaged solution, suitable for Financial Institutions seeking to incorporate Product Centric functionality into existing cumbersome legacy systems.  It covers a wide range of processes, such as product envisioning, design and fast product launch. This fast product launching feature, allows the marketing department of financial institutions to tailor new products, early launch them into the market, and stay ahead of competition while gaining significant competitive advantage.

Today’s fast-paced competitive marketplaces means increasing pressure to raise profits, do more with less and operate more efficiently. Achieving these goals requires faster, and improved decision-making ability, across your entire organization.  uniBI Business Intelligence and Reporting platform, incorporates a robust business model that covers the informational needs of a financial institution (from a decision support, operational, auditing and risk perspective). Its open architectural design allows the gathering of information from multiple sources (within and outside the solution) to provide value-added information and aid management in decision making and business planning.

Open banking is meant to improve customers’ banking experience in several ways. Open banking regulations require banks to publish, both online and inside their branches, accurate and unbiased information that lets consumers evaluate their service quality. The services that are currently available through bMASTER Open Banking Microservices cover the majority of banking business processes such as Customer Onboarding, Account Opening, Payments, Transfers, and Account Inquiry.

For over the past thirty years digital disruption has been reshaping economies, transforming business strategies and introducing new means of conducting trade. Companies committed to old business practices, lose ground and even some are pushed out of business. Challengers that embrace new business models gain advantage and take a dominant position in the market. Financial Institutions are no exception to this disruption. They have found themselves competing against “neo banks” and fin techs, which offer fully digitalized services and unique experiences to their customers. 

In order for financial institutions to increase client acquisition they must bring traditional banking to the new era through embracing new communication channels and offering a unique customer experience, thus satisfying the most demanding desires of the next generation of customers. 

The Digital Customer Onboarding solution, offered by Uni Systems, provides capabilities for the definition and incorporation of “new customer acquisition” strategies, resulting in a unique customer-centric experience and automatic opening of an account process.

What makes it unique?

• Built in Business Process Management for parametric definition of customer onboarding process.
• Perform Automatic KYC Verification Process and Scoring of Customer
• Product Factory for definition of products and services based on Customer Scoring
• Perform checks against Lists (Global Sanction Lists, PEP lists, etc.)
• Perform Customer Liveliness Tests and Face Matching
• Automatic Document Verification Process and Storage
• Open Banking micro services for integration with Banking Systems
• Automatic Opening of Customer and Account

Experience

• Knowledge of business process re-engineering in-depth with 20+ years’ experience
• Over 10 business process re-engineering implementations over the years in retail & corporate Financial Institutions
• Broad functionality coverage with 30+ off the shelf components
• Implementations in SE region and Cyprus
• Proven solution in FI with 200+ branches

TOTEM is a unique tool that has been created to meet the needs that many Banks and other large institutions worldwide are facing; to re-engineer and modernize their existing complex legacy applications in a more efficient way. Furthermore, it aims at exploring new architecture standards like SOA, micro-services, Open Banking, using modern technologies and tools, without losing the critical “knowledge” that is contained in these applications and their specifications, most of which are not available any more. 

Banks need to be part of the new digital world and fight for their market position and existing customer base, as FinTech companies and neo-banks are threatening to acquire a big part of their market share. Therefore, they need to take advantage of all available tools, that can assist them in making our world interconnected and the use of our IT systems more efficient, user-friendly and flexible! 

Uni Systems’ tool, TOTEM, provides the ability to “read” all the specifications existing in the code of legacy applications, usually written in Cobol, in a comprehensive way, by reading large comprehensive fragments of the existing code and generating pseudo-code that can be read and understood by a business analyst minimizing the need of a high cost subject matter expert engagement. As a result, a person with no knowledge of COBOL and with low knowledge of the domain logic can analyze the business logic using the automatically generated logical flows for each piece of selected code. With TOTEM, organizations can re-design and modernize the existing systems and take advantage of parts of the existing applications, that can be exploited in a modern WEB API way.

An Automated Payments system, that operates as a hub in a multi-entity environment and covers the full spectrum of funds transfers to and from a bank, through any payment channel (ex. SWIFT, EBA/STEP2 EBA/SEPA etc.) covering Domestic, International, Instant Payments, SEPA CT/ DD, Bulk Payments etc.

Incoming and Outgoing SWIFT Messages, as well as Interbank messages, though all related channels (ex. TARGET II, EBA/STEP1, EBA/EURO1). Straight-through-processing (STP) and interbank messaging. Life tracking of any event related to the payment order life and provision of information, MIS Reporting and Statistics. 

Create and receive all SEPA (pacs) messages for Credit Transfers and Direct Debits, SEPA cancellations and refunds.

Make payments faster anywhere in the SEPA zone, combining the SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme with PSD2 open banking.  

Today more than ever, just as the economy and the financial industry are starting to get back on track, new technological forces and continuing regulatory control are forcing banks to reconsider and improve the credit approval process. The Loans Origination, offered by Uni systems, is a complete credit application processing system, which manages the approval process of the loan. It tracks the progress of the application at every stage of the life cycle across different departments and different roles. Its flexible nature allows management to map the credit approval process into the system, and through management decision-making tools to monitor its execution.

In recent years several factors forced everyday banking to evolve. New service channels were established to provide value-added services to the consumer. The economic slowdown has affected consumer expenditure, making purchase financing a critical tool to maintain or even increase sale levels. Traditional Banks have now to compete with retail firms entering the Financial Services market,  using their already established brand name and convenient place stores, as well as the low-cost marketing channels for financial products, utilizing their cross-selling capabilities.

As profit margins decline, banks are forced to re-engineer the Branch as their traditional delivery channel. eLOANS Consumer Finance Solution can suit Banks or Specialized Financial Divisions (hybrid schemes financial subsidiaries of retail firms, big retailers that self-finance their products) that focus on an extended network of Business Partners that act as intermediaries to the end consumer.
 

Today more than ever huge credit losses and continuing regulatory control are forcing banks to reconsider and improve credit business processes. CREDITplus Lending Management Platform is a complete end-to-end loan management system that is secure, scalable, flexible, and quick to implement, hence providing the bank complete control and management over its exposure and collateral coverage. 

With shrinking margins in trade finance business, the biggest challenges that banks are facing today include improving service levels, increasing scale of operations and ensuring regulatory compliances without adding additional costs. As paper based trade processes are likely to continue to dominate, banks are looking forward to streamline inefficiencies in trade operations by automating trade operations in an electronically driven paperless environment.

With the ever growing competition, it's imperative for banks to optimize the complete trade finance processing, from origination, issuance, amendment to collection. Most of these banks provide Trade Finance and International Banking Services to their commercial customers to help them expand their business in the global marketplace and maintain their margins and profits. Typical Trade Finance Services include issuing Letters of Credit, Short and Medium Term Trade Finance Instruments, International Payments and Collections.

The Funds are, for several decades now, one of the most effective forms of investment in an international level. Alongside investment funds, a variety of investment products are offered to investors to in order to facilitate access to profit opportunities offered by the global markets accompanied by a professional management of the investment. 

Uni Systems targeted solutions in this market branch already complete 20 years of successful applications and provide integrated solutions designed to fully cover the needs of banking entities, Mutual Funds, GMF Companies and other investment companies operating in this market. 

Trading & Market Making  

Proven solution facilitating, market making, arbitrage trading and automated rules-based trading (spread trading, algorithmic trading, HFT) for all exchange traded instruments.  The solution’s focus is on speed, in order to meet constantly evolving requirements in today’s sophisticated exchange trading environment. 

Post Trading Services – Derivatives 

Uni Systems has been at the forefront of post-trade derivatives IT services and support for more than 20 years. The solution supports all critical middle- and back-office processes ensuring reduced TCO and Operational Risk, time-to-market, scalability, transparency and compliance,, covering exchange-traded and OTC cleared derivatives, traded in markets around the globe. 

A strong, secure and robust Back-Office solution that works in on-line / real-time operation with a central front-office system and provides centralized management of all treasury operations of a group of Banks, where every single deal can be captured, matched, monitored, settled and confirmed centrally. Due to its parametric design it supports several accounting schemes for each bank of the group, interfacing with different core banking, payment systems and local payment systems. 

Asset Classes covered include FX, Derivatives, Securities/ Bonds /Repos, Money Market, Synthetic/ Structured products. 
 

The banking organizations, developing a personal relationship with their existing customers, are using insurance products for the benefit of their clients, who save time and money while maintaining the relationship of trust with their bank. The relationship of trust between the bank and the customer is strengthened by the Bankassurance solutions supported by Uni Systems. 

Internal Variable Funds Management 

The application of Internal Variable Funds (IVF) manages collective investments (Individual life plans, Group pension plans, Retirement plans etc.) through sub funds (IVF). The management of investment movements (investments - acquisitions) is effected on a per client, per contract and per IVF-basis. The monitoring of the investment portfolios of the IVF is achieved through full automation of all daily and periodical acts. All types of investments (equities, mutual funds, bonds, repos, swap, derivatives etc.) may belong to the IVF portfolio. 

UL -iSeries 

UL-iSeries software implements a complete Bankassurance application for the management of Unit Linked products at the iSeries (AS / 400) platform, which includes the entire turnover of the insurance company, the mutual funds and the sales’ network,  any mutual funds of any currency, either Greek or foreign are the investment subject of Unit Linked products, while the basis for the investment monitoring is the contract signed by the client. There are possibilities of communication with any mutual fund management company (Mutual Funds) or any Internal Variable Funds’ application. The various transactions are carried out per contract and generate holding applications or redemptions in mutual funds, while their liquidation, have the may be subject to real time online credit-debit of the Central Banking System. There is also a connection with the General Accounting through automated accounting articles. 

This application applies to the Bank’s Cheques Clearing center. 

The core functionality covers the maintenance (scanning, metadata update, sorting, storing) of the cheques body as collected by the branches. The metadata update (cheque amount, currency, date, branch etc) is performed through OCR. The manual input and maintenance by the users is also available.  

Finally, the application produces interface files for General Ledger update, reporting, statistics, cash letter etc for the correspondents or for internal use. 

The main modules are the following: 

• Outgoing clearing (cheques in EUR) 
• Cheques in non EUR currency 
• Non EUR cheques Backoffice 

Based on the money laundering mandates, banks need sufficient tools to:

• Authenticate customers’ identities when opening accounts and ensure continuous risk assessment of them (Know Your Customer)
• Monitor customers’ transactions and create a dynamic customer behavior profile (Anti-Money Laundering)
• Investigate suspicious behaviors and anomalies, as well as generate reports if needed (Anti-Money Laundering and SAR reporting)

Banks are required to manage exposures to operational risks in a business environment where regulations are constantly changing and evolving. 

Moreover, having entered the digital era, banks are also expected to implement financial crime solutions which employ Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies, ensure 360-degree surveillance and minimize false-positive results. 

Uni Systems has a dedicated Regulatory Compliance team with 30+ implementations in Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), Case Management (CM) and other compliance solutions during the previous years. Via our partnerships and their compliance programs, we have gained insight in the philosophy of the most advanced compliance solutions. 

Our implementations span across many countries, including Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, UK, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania, Malta and Egypt, as well as large, small and medium-sized banks.

Apart from our implementations, we offer a wide spectrum of consulting services, best practices and support services in order to add more value to our customers who have financial crime solutions in place. We conduct user training sessions to continuously assist the customer make the best of their solutions.
 

Banking digitalization has already created a banking fraud revolution. Throughout recent years, digital banking fraud has become a quickly growing area, where fraudsters utilize increasingly sophisticated tools.

Customers are now using a growing number of channels (such as mobile and online) in order to perform their daily transactions. The available “attack surface” for fraudsters has expanded immensely. In addition, the implementation of Open Banking and PSD2 provides additional routes to criminals.

To make things worse, banks and financial institutions face business, regulatory and technology challenges, such as:

• Limited customer awareness on online fraud risks
• According to PSD2 / Open Banking banks will be held liable for unauthorized transactions on customers’ accounts through open APIs
• Several banks implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) oriented fraud solutions which end up to be a poor fit for their daily businesses or are not backed up by proper data (causing the common “overfitting” problem)

Along with our partners, we believe that a modern fraud solution should be based upon 3 main pillars. 

• Transparency: Findings should be easily explainable.
• Balance: Effective fraud prevention, as well as potential customer inconvenience (for example when their transactions are blocked) should be carefully balanced.
• Data Sets: Data should meet certain criteria in order for AI and ML technologies to be properly employed.

Uni Systems and its partners offer modern anti-fraud solutions which utilize ML and AI technologies and build for the new digital world. They offer the ability to operate in real-time and block transactions. They offer an enhanced ability to continuously learn from feedback and anticipate new behaviors of fraud. Additionally, they take into consideration one of the biggest challenges of modern compliance solutions, which is no other than minimizing false-positive results.
 

XBRL Reporting

Ιn today’s rapidly changing world, organizations are required to make effective decisions based on speed and agility. The key to succeeding to this is information. Information which is right, complete and that enables further action. Therefore, organizations that stand out are the ones that leverage data in the right context and at the right time to end up with the right decisions. After all, this is the real value of XBRL for an organization.

Along with our partners, we provide a platform which allows users to automate the process of creating, receiving, processing, storing, managing and analyzing XBRL-based documents. The integrated capabilities of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and business process management (BPM) provide innovative ways to develop business analysis models and automate them, which delivers the full value of XBRL to make effective decisions.

Our partners’s software is the most comprehensive and complete to cater for all stages of XBRL implementations. It is a market-tested solution used by regulatory bodies, auditors, filers, analysts, and major enterprises in over 34 countries around the world. Powerful software development kit (SDK) and tools make creation, validation, and analysis of XBRL documents dramatically more efficient and cost-effective.

Indicative benefits of our partners’ XBRL software offering are described below:

• Enhance visibility into Financial Reporting
• Comply with the latest regulatory mandates
• Eliminate paper-based, error-prone reporting processes
• Improve verification, analysis, reformatting and redistribution of financial data
• Increase productivity around financial reporting

Implementation of the PSD2 Regulation in banking, requires a thorough understanding of the regulation and of its technological standards as well as of the particularities of their implementation framework. 
Unisystems participate in Berlin Group’s NextGenPSD2 advisory board and have done the analysis, design and implementation of the regulatory requirements for our customers. We also provide Consulting Services in the field.
 

Credit Risk Rating solution interfaces with all applicable internal and external systems in order to collect customer – related data (ex. Financial Statements, Credit bureaus, loan balances, delays etc.) and according to specific rules and workflows applies the relevant credit rating model in order to produce the customer’s credit rate. The solution is multi-lingual and incorporates dashboards, reports and alerts.

Banks will face significant capital shortfalls under Basel IV/CRR3 reforms proposed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS). 

They must ensure transparency and re-define mitigation measures based on the expected rules. 
Uni Systems has acquired substantial expertise, having already implemented numerous Credit and Market Risk pillars of the previous Basel incarnation. We have teamed up with best-of-breed vendors to provide the optimal solution to fit your needs. 

In today’s world data powers everything an organization does. Organizations that take a systemic approach to data governance will win in the era of data.

Banks and financial institutions bring UniSystems in when:

• Handling massive volumes of highly diverse data across an ever-expanding array of databases, systems and applications, makes it more difficult for them to find and trust all of their organization’s information.
• They are searching for a solution to provide trustworthy answers on where their data is and who is responsible for them.
• Under significant pressure to eliminate the possibility of steep fines and tarnished reputation by non-compliance to BCBS 239 and GDPR.
• Challenged by finding a data governance software which is user-friendly and therefore easily adopted by the business people.
• Seeking a competitive advantage by a) defining data governance roles and responsibilities and b) by avoiding overlapping or duplicate activities.
• Committed to meet heightened expectations for increased data transparency, data quality and consistent data definitions as well as reporting accuracy.

Along with our partners, we provide enterprise-wide data governance software that puts people and processes first, automating data governance and management to quickly and securely deliver trusted data to the business users who need it. We deliver the governance and stewardship capabilities required to help every data citizen in an organization find data quickly, understand what it means, and use it to drive results.

Uni Systems continues to grow, because we are very different from what you will find in the marketplace:

• Our partners’ solutions competitive advantages are that they are built from business people for business people.
• We empower the roles of CDOs, DPOs and data stewards.
• We take a consumer approach to data discovery.
• We view data governance as a long-term commitment.
• Data Governance Center is delivered as cloud-based or on-premise solution.