A European banking group operating across numerous legal entities and consolidation sub-levels had very high-volume consolidated reporting requirements (over 1,600 reports differentiated by audience and consolidation level).

Existing, largely manual processes consumed significant resources and generated error risks incompatible with quality and time requirements. Finance teams were burdened with low-value-added production tasks.

Before implementing any tools, a thorough clarification of the target consolidation architecture and a streamlining of reporting processes were essential.

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The major challenge was the operational efficiency of the Finance function: how to industrialize the production of over 1,600 differentiated monthly reports, freeing teams from repetitive manual tasks and allowing them to focus on value-added analysis?

Existing processes were consuming considerable resources for production operations (report generation, intercompany eliminations, reprocessing), to the detriment of time devoted to analysis and management dialogue. The risk of error with such large volumes was structurally high.

The objective was to industrialize the system to:

• automate the generation of all consolidated reports by level and audience,

• ensure the reliability of eliminations and reprocessing with integrated controls,

• drastically reduce production time to reallocate resources to analysis.

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Faced with a production volume that was exhausting the teams, we first conducted an audit of the 1,600 reports to identify redundancies and those actually being used. Nearly 20% of the reports produced were no longer being consulted. This streamlining allowed us to focus automation efforts on value-added deliverables.

Our intervention covered:

• redesigning the consolidation architecture to enable automated report generation by consolidation level and audience,

• automating intercompany eliminations and restatements, with consistency checks detecting anomalies before validation,

• implementing production workflows that allow teams to focus on variance analysis rather than report generation.

The Finance teams now dedicate 70% of their time to analysis and management discussions, compared to 30% previously.