SAMA Case Study

Established in 1952, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) is the Central Bank of the Kingdom of Saudi. SAMA’s mandate includes managing the Kingdom’s foreign exchange reserves, the monetary policy for maintaining the stability of prices and exchange rate, and promoting the growth of the financial system while ensuring its soundness. SAMA is also responsible for supervising commercial banks and exchange dealers, cooperative insurance companies, finance companies, and credit information companies.

In 2013, SAMA discovered that a number of legacy business applications, including those performing the majority of their core and administrative functions, needed to be replaced with modern, off the shelf IT systems that could be customised, to meet SAMA’s specific needs.

With five supervision departments including the General Departments of Banking Control, Insurance Control, and Finance Companies Control, SAMA needed a robust system that supported the full supervisory process and was also stable, secure, flexible and functional.

Following a rigorous procurement process, Vizor Software was selected by SAMA to implement a Returns Management System (RMS) to automate the complete regulatory return lifecycle.

As of March 31st, 2015 with the launch of Phase 1, all insurers operating in the Kingdom’s insurance sector were required to file regulatory returns through the RMS online portal.

Achieving a full system go-live within three months was considered a considerable achievement by SAMA. This success was made possible by Vizor Software’s out-of-the-box capabilities and the collaborative nature of the SAMA-Vizor relationship.

SAMA gained significant efficiencies from the implementation of Vizor Software. With RMS in place, the complete regulatory return lifecycle, from the definition of complex financial and corporate returns through to the scheduling, collection, validation, processing and analysis of regulatory return data is now automated through the Vizor Portal. An online, single point of contact for regulatory submissions, the portal enabled significant improvements in the areas of data timeliness, quality, security and analysis. SAMA also benefited from the newfound ability to implement new regulatory data initiatives themselves as required.

Phase two went live December 31st, 2015 and saw SAMA and Vizor extend the scope of RMS to include supervision of the banking sector. In phase three, the system scope was extended to include supervision of the finance companies sector.