What Can Go Wrong with an EUCA?
Co-Authored by
/ andExcel-based End User Computing Applications(EUCAs) pose a monumental risk to banks and financial institutions. They run in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, and are very pervasive across the bank.
As if this weren’t enough, the OCC unleashed a massive penalty against a top 5 bank in 2020 raising awareness of EUCA risk and adding this important issue to its audit playbook. If you are new to the world of EUCAs Learn more about the Anatomy of the EUCAs here.
This is a task of gigantic proportions and the question is how does one characterize the risk associated with a EUCA to justify an institution-wide EUCA Mitigation Program.
From a twenty thousand feet view, an EUCA looks like a well-oiled machine- data needs to go from point A through a transformation to point B — pretty simple. But as we zoom in, our blissful ignorance is challenged, and the dangerous risks associated with Excel and how it is natively used in a process come into focus.
So what can go wrong? One of the leading causes of mistakes is related to data errors caused by emailing or using the wrong input/output file or applying the wrong filter for a report used in the EUCA as an input.
Copy-paste errors are rampant in end-user computing applications, and due to the inherent lack of validation and change tracking in Excel, there have been many cases of ‘fat finger’ errors that have resulted in large sums of money being transferred to wrong parties and/or bad entries in the core financial ledger which results in re-reporting, compliance issues, redundancy, and above all complete lack of visibility.
Inherent to using Excel is the lack of “data auditability”. And while many say they have file auditability, and that is better than nothing, it doesn’t help the auditor or the approver understand “what, why, and when” has changed, by whom, and by how much.
As these are file-based activities, the management has very low visibility into the status of the work and has a lot of difficulties ensuring that deadlines are met while managing workflow reassignments, or onboarding new customers.
The impact of EUCA errors could result in financial ledger errors, wrong regulatory reports, or even worse, wrong financial decisions.
On top of all of this, all of this data, input files, output files, all typically sit on the user desktop in their local machine, which accentuates the risks as well. So, the risk is compounded by having the data at rest on the user's desktop. This is discussed in detail in Data At a Rest on the desktop is Data at Risk.
The manual EUCA process is driven by technology limitations that are ancillary to single-user systems and do not support multiple users due to technical limitations such as copy-paste, which have up to 70–80% drop in efficiency and eventually impact the velocity and the accuracy of money.
Now you can’t say you don’t know what can go wrong with an EUCA!
We @Boardwalktech, Inc., have built Velocity, a low code, plug-and-play platform that absorbs the EUCA model and data, preserves the Excel experience, and eliminates data at rest on the desktop along with EUCA risk.
Velocity eliminates the risk associated with an EUCA up to 70% faster than competition !!
Think of it and come back to us!
Till next time!
