Specialist UK savings and lending bank Shawbrook has deployed a central platform for the management of business-critical spreadsheets.

The new solution, developed by ClusterSeven, provides the bank with central, automated oversight of all major spreadsheets and end-user computing models. It provides automated audit trails that highlight when and what changes have been made by individuals in the bank’s high risk applications.

Donna Bradley, head of operational risk at Shawbrook Bank, said: “Many of our business-critical models are user-developed applications in Excel, which fall outside of the scope of IT and other enterprise systems. Excel offers tremendous benefits for collating, reconciling, manipulating and summarizing key data, but due to a lack of controls (like in Word), there is a risk of critical structural changes to macros and links going undetected and passed into production.

“Manually monitoring changes in these complex models is impossible, and spreadsheet errors can potentially be extremely costly to our organisation, both financially and reputation wise. With the pressure of regulation and demands for auditable model governance, automating spreadsheet management is the only conceivable way that we can comply and mitigate spreadsheet risk.”

“Shawbrook Bank is realistic about the fact that user-built spreadsheet applications will always be a key tool in business operation,” Henry Umney, CEO of ClusterSeven added. “Rather than trying to limit its use in favour of other enterprise systems – an exercise that often fails – the bank has taken a strategic approach to its management for the benefit of users who need the flexible functionality of Excel to perform their day-to-day activities.”

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