RM Applications: Simplifying Data Management

The penetration of big data in Southeast Asia is still in its nascent stages. Financial institutions are beginning to explore data lakes and usage of big data for data management and analytics. At present, organizations are largely focused on automation and processing of structured data to ascertain the quantitative aspects. On the other hand, unstructured data has also evolved as the new oil, assisting in analyzing the qualitative aspects. Despite the considerable hype and reported success of big data investments, the skill gap continues to be a major adoption inhibitor. To meet industrial demands, RM Applications’ (RMA) is developing rich skill set in big data to bail out its clients with its bespoke solutions that sharply focus on data management using omnidata. “As the financial industry turns to data modeling, we are focusing on ‘R’ modeling which is expected to aid in crunching data to build data models, especially in credit risk, liquidity, Basel, and regulatory reporting such as MFRS9,” says Lokesh Gupta, co-founder and head of delivery, RM Applications. RMA has successfully delivered leading-edge technology solutions in areas like remittance and payments, ALM and liquidity reporting data mart, ETL consulting and development, customized data mart, localization and integration of partners' solutions.

Driven by a passion and vision to strive for excellence by delivering comprehensive and customer-oriented solutions, RMA was founded by a group of experienced professionals with the thought “Why Can’t it be Done,” addressing niche requirements that cannot be addressed through off-the-shelf solutions. Having found that the existing enterprise data warehouse solutions fall short of requirements and regulatory guidelines, RMA has consistently focused on catering to this niche requirement of remittances and other small value cross-border payments. RMA’s flagship product for financial institutions, OmniRemit supports mobile and online remittance, branch remittance, and remittance back-office solutions, which comply with Bank Negara Malaysia and Anti Money Laundering (AMLA) requirements. “Our customer-centric solution with web and mobile platform is MoneyGram-ready and provides a real-time interface with cross-border remittance corridors for transaction processing,” adds Gupta.

To expand the offering further Money Changing Function and Integration with blockchain is part of the immediate product roadmap.

RMA develops bespoke, faster, and easier data marts that make the semi-processed data available, which can be directly fed into the risk and regulatory reporting engine to generate the reports and for analytics in the area of Asset Liability Management (ALM), AMLA, Basel III, Funds Transfer Pricing (FTP), MFRS9, and other regulatory reporting data mart. From the analytics, BI, and reports development perspective, the company facilitates customized reporting, dashboards, and alerting solutions for various business verticals largely in the area of compliance. RMA’s DataMart solutions simplify and automate the data flow and assure end-to-end data management. The company also enhances data quality with checks built at the data management layer, while the exception management allows smoother business post-implementation. “Our data integrity and reconciliation checks ensure that meaningful data is reported, while email alerts provide real-time information on data processing and exceptions,” explains Gupta.

In an instance, a leading regional Malaysian bank having subsidiaries across Southeast Asia required RMA’s assistance in data management. A structured data management approach was followed to source data from multiple systems, eliminating discrepancies with proper exception handling to ensure data integrity. Data hubbing was practiced to merge data across entities into centralized data for consolidated LCR/ NSFR and stress reporting, integrating seamlessly with the bank source systems within the entity and merge cross-border data for entities overseas. With RMA’s expertise, the bank successfully achieved the integrated data management levels required under Basel III at an entity and headquarter level with minimal human intervention.

RMA focuses on Continuous Improvement and strong believer of “Work in Process”, i.e. improvement is a never ending process. The credit of success to date is to our customers for awarding us with opportunities to collaborate and serve their needs in innovative manner. This has become achievable with the RMA’s flat organization structure, flexible culture, better training and working platform, family kind environment, which has helped them in building the strong core team and called themselves as RMATES.

RMA aims to collaborate with partners and customers to penetrate into newer markets while following their agile approach in developing bespoke solutions. “We wish to provide digital technology-driven bespoke solutions in Data Management and also to move away from cash-based payments to digital payments using advanced hybrid technology, QR, blockchain, and digital assets as a method of processing remittance and payments,” concludes Gupta.