As banks expand their global operations, the European Commission has adopted the International Accounting Standards (IAS) framework to increase transparency among organizations operating in the European Union – thus fostering investor confidence and optimizing working capital and risk management.

SAP Accounting for Financial Instruments is designed specifically to help banks prepare for and meet IAS regulations. In particular, the solution addresses compliance with IAS 32 and IAS 39 – the rules that relate to the valuation of financial instruments.

Using SAP Accounting for Financial Instruments to prepare a local IAS-compliant financial report, you can create a parallel financial statement based on a central data pool fed by your bank's existing system landscape. For IAS-relevant business transactions, IAS-compliant values are calculated, and these values replace the original results in the local financial report.

This technique avoids parallel and redundant data storage. Values are replaced only if the results in the local financial report differ from the IAS figures. Finally, the original data that complies with IAS – and the newly calculated IAS results – are consolidated according to your bank's reporting requirements and analyzed by using SAP Business Intelligence. This data can be exported for further processing in other applications as needed.

Furthermore, with SAP Accounting for Financial Instruments, you can address the IAS regulatory challenge within the fuller context of enterprise management. Designed around a central data pool and standardized methods, our solution for IAS can be seamlessly integrated into an efficient overall enterprise management solution.