RiskTech100 2024 Winner's Spotlight: Surya Soft

Enterprise Cashflow Management

Surya Software Systems (Surya) wins the Enterprise Cashflow Management award in this year’s Chartis RiskTech100. Since emerging in the RiskTech100 as a ‘Rising Star’ three years ago, the company’s continued fast-paced evolution has also cemented its position in the overall rankings this year.

Surya offers a strong suite of risk and balance sheet management solutions to help banks, financial institutions and corporate treasurers meet their business and regulatory requirements. These solutions encompass all key risk management areas, including asset & liability management (ALM), liquidity, capital adequacy, credit risk, regulatory compliance and operational risk. 

The Bangalore-headquartered company’s core markets are in focused geographies, such as India, key markets in Africa and the Middle East. Its footprint is also increasing in newer geographies such as Southeast Asia and North America.

Innovative and flexible solutions

‘We are honored to receive the RiskTech100 award for Enterprise Cashflow Management,’ says D.N. Prahlad, Surya’s Founder and Non-Executive Chairman. ‘This recognition reflects our commitment to delivering innovative and reliable solutions for risk management and regulatory compliance. We believe that our customer-centric approach, deep domain expertise and continuous investment in research and development are the key drivers behind our award win.’ 

Surya’s solid foundation and expertise in financial markets has enabled it to develop flexible solutions that can progressively adapt to a rapidly changing marketplace and new regulations. 

‘We stand out from our competitors by offering a comprehensive platform that covers the entire lifecycle, from data management and analytics to reporting and visualization,’ explains Prahlad. ‘Our platform is flexible, scalable, and adaptable to the evolving needs of our clients across geographies. We augment this with best-in-class support to ensure the successful implementation and adoption of our solutions.’

Solving customer challenges

Surya’s product suite is driven by its Data Harmonizer engine. This provides the key handshake with external host systems and data sources. It forms an intrinsic part of Surya’s solutions, ensuring data extraction, reconciliation, cash flow generation, dynamic data addition for scenario creation, and aggregation.

Getting accurate, reconciled data on time is one of the biggest challenges for banks looking to measure profitability and risk, or inform their strategic direction. In India there has been a huge increase in the number of bank accounts, particularly in rural areas, thanks to demonetization. While the volume of transactions has increased significantly, transaction sizes have become much smaller, making the task of getting timely and accurate data a continuing challenge for banks. 

Banks need to integrate data from multiple sources, ensuring quality, consistency, reconciliation, and validation across different systems and formats. They are required to process large volumes of data to produce a variety of critical regulatory reports, which have to be submitted on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, depending on the jurisdiction and the size of the bank. 

To meet these challenges Surya‘s Data Harmonizer now uses RUST - a programming language with low instruction cycles that preserves resources. It has also shifted from traditional relational databases to Google’s Open-Sourced Protocol Buffer and introduced ORM for all analytical and reporting modules, so that it is database agnostic.

Surya reports that a large client bank (with $450 billion in assets) completes the generation of cashflows for 20 million retail loan accounts within few minutes and the entire end-to-end processing of all products is completed within an hour. 

‘These changes have therefore achieved incredibly fast run times - even for banks with very large retail portfolios. Our solution leads to reductions in extraction times, storage requirements and costs,’ says Prahlad. ‘Surya is the only vendor in India able to produce Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) and Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) reports on a t+1 (i.e. next morning) basis for large banks and the fact that we have a common data model across all modules also hugely reduces the efforts for bank IT and user teams,’ he continues.

Another key challenge facing Surya’s clients is the requirement for simulations and stress tests to assess the impact of changes in market conditions, customer behavior, and business strategy. 

‘Surya Soft’s solution helps our clients address these challenges by providing a comprehensive set of analytical tools and reports that enable them to perform multi-dimensional balance sheet analysis. Our product suite simplifies the definition of even the most complex product, evaluates the potential impact of changes on the balance sheet and overall business operations, improves the quality and efficiency of reporting, and integrates with vendor and proprietary transaction processing systems,’ says Prahlad.

Recent developments 

Surya has earnt recognition for its ability to evolve and adapt to changing market needs and opportunities. ‘We invest heavily in research and development to keep pace with emerging technologies and a changing regulatory landscape. We constantly enhance our platform with new features and functionalities,’ explains Prahlad.

On the product front, some of the recent developments include: developing a comprehensive framework for measuring and managing interest rate risk in the banking book (IRRBB) by anticipating final regulations from provisional ones; and implementing a robust and flexible capital planning and stress testing solution. This enables clients to assess their capital adequacy under various scenarios, identify potential shortfalls and take proactive actions to mitigate them.

Portfolio expansion

Looking to the future, Surya plans to expand its solution portfolio further, including dynamic balance sheet management, adding a new module for reverse stress testing, and further developing AI-based granular customer behavior analysis.

‘We have developed techniques to create and test interfaces faster. The beauty of this architecture is that the same data is made available with different aggregations to different analytical modules. For instance, the same data is aggregated differently for LCR and IRRBB. More importantly, we can simulate balance sheet and profit and loss on a daily basis for projections, be it business plans or stress scenarios, to enable dynamic balance sheet management,’ explains Prahlad.

In its upcoming release, Surya is also introducing a new module for reverse stress testing. This will allow users to define critical points of failure, conduct vulnerability analyses, and create detailed storyboards outlining potential adverse scenarios. ‘With user-friendly parameterization tools, the module will enable users to build detailed scenarios while specifying their impact on various elements of the balance sheet. It will have a robust monitoring and reporting system to provide real-time insights into the status of identified risks, thus empowering financial institutions to proactively adjust their risk management strategies,’ explains Prahlad. 

With regards data analytics, Surya will shortly be releasing products with OLAP capabilities on low storage data warehousing and is working on many AI based predictive analytics solutions.

Surya is constantly looking to leverage its expertise and experience to provide innovative solutions, moving into newer areas such as operational risk. ‘We have designed and deployed a state-of-the-art operational risk management system, which helps our clients to identify, measure, monitor and control their operational risks, as well as to report them in a transparent and consistent manner. This is a current strategic area of focus for us,’ Prahlad explains. 

Continued evolution

Surya will continue to focus on creating new products that cater to the requirements of an ever-growing number of financial institutions globally. ‘With a country like India yet to fully formalize its banking sector, the potential for growth in such an environment is vast,’ says Prahlad. 

‘We are confident that our strategic focus on R&D and innovation will enable us to continue to outperform our competitors and deliver value to our customers. We are constantly looking for new opportunities and challenges in the financial sector, and we are ready to adapt and evolve with the changing market conditions. We are not just a software company; we are a solution provider,’ concludes Prahlad.