In Compliance with FINMA Circulars on Outsourcing arrangements and on Operational Risks, BWS was requested to review all agreements with Vendors, assessing the correctness and completeness of contractual provisions and internal processes in the domain of Outsourcing of significant functions.
BWS was also mandated to complement contracts with additional provisions, where deemed necessary, discuss directly with the Vendors and evaluate with Legal Department the most suitable contractual integrations.
Based on the deep knowledge built in decades of similar projects and situations, BWS had the responsibility to:
• review all contracts currently in place with most of the bank IT Service Providers, with regard to the Service Level Agreements, the service monitoring, the General Terms and Conditions and the pricing proposals,
• assess whether such contracts fulfil the FINMA Circular 2018/3 on Outsourcing,
• assess the internal controls in place with regard to the IT contract provisions and the services received,
and, once the review was completed:
• implement the revised processes, where needed, along the Vendor management value chain,
• in terms of Service Level Agreements review, liaise with the internal vendor owners to provide them with the list of changes to the contracts negotiated with the vendors and define the interventions to be requested, the way to submit such requests if impacts on the existing conditions were foreseeable,
• support the bank during the meeting with the vendors.
The final deliverables allowed the bank to:
• Produce an updated inventory of outsourced functions,
• Mitigate the risks of non-compliance with the regulations into force and prepare the ground for the annual audit,
• Improve several contractual provisions in favour of a better risk management and more balanced contractual obligations,
• Improve internal controls, also through an enriched vendor service reporting.
In terms of advantages, working with BWS, the bank has been able to leverage on our standard methodology for projects of Outsourcing arrangements assessment, acknowledging a competitive cost/benefit ratio and a very fast execution of the review.