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By Tom Groenfeldt
Financial technology giant Fiserv has partnered with Finsbury Solutions, a London-based provider of spreadsheet control and compliance software, to launch its new Spreadsheet Workbench.
Global corporations, from banks to oil companies to pharmaceuticals, may have more than 100,000 Excel spreadsheets, many of them feeding data to other spreadsheets, some of them containing pricing information that affects bonuses. Yet Excel itself has historically lacked controls over cells and audit trails to record changes to data and who made the modifications.
With growing regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley for accuracy in data and surety in reporting, companies have recognized the jungle of spreadsheets as a compliance challenge. Along with Finsbury, ClusterSeven in London and Prodiance in Pleasanton, Calif. are among the leading vendors focusing on the area.
"We are the first major vendor to get into this sphere," said John Pfuhler, director of product management for financial control solutions at Brookfield, Wisc.-based Fiserv. "There is a rapidly growing awareness that spreadsheets represent serious risk." A Web search for "spreadsheet hell" turns up many examples of user frustration and fear over spreadsheets.
Fiserv says that in a survey it recently conducted, it found that 90 percent of organizations believe that current practices in using spreadsheets represent a material risk, yet the majority said they had only rudimentary controls in place.
With the rollout of Spreadsheet Workbench with Finsbury, Fiserv says it can now offer customers the ability to incorporate enterprise-wide spreadsheet controls. It can identify end users of spreadsheets and links between spreadsheets and then enforce appropriate controls in use of the spreadsheets, version controls and licensing.
"Firms realize that spreadsheets pose significant risks, but the problem is often perceived as too costly or difficult to resolve," said Elizabeth Elkins, general manager in financial control solutions at Fiserv. "As reports of crippling abuse, fraud and critical errors continue to hit the headlines and bottom lines of organizations across the globe, ubiquity and complexity associated with spreadsheets can no longer sideline efforts to gain control and transparency of this critical data."
Fiserv's Pfuhler said the financial crisis has made firms more aware of the need to improve controls, since much of the information reported before the crisis has come into question.
"If I am managing data in a spreadsheet, I am not in control," he added. Clients have been asking Fiserv for some solution in spreadsheets and compliance, and they want software that won't require expensive wholesale changes to their systems, he added. Spreadsheet Workbench applies its controls without interrupting the day-to-day operations.
"The most prevalent risk is accidental error, and with Spreadsheet Workbench you can compare versions and evaluate whether changes are correct." Other concerns driving firms to look at spreadsheet controls are fraud, audit control, and getting a grasp on operations after a merger or acquisition. An acquiring firm can point Spreadsheet Workbench to the network of a new acquisition to identify the material spreadsheets. The tool can also take hundreds of hours out of the process of closing the books at the end of a reporting period, added Pfuhler.
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