MDSap showcase CCH® Tagetik project for Turkey Wealth Fund at IDC Financial Services Summit
MDSap and Wolters Kluwer were Platinum Sponsors of the IDC summit
Nesrin Demirci, GM of MDSap Turkey, recently presented with colleagues about the successful CCH® Tagetik deployment for the Turkish Wealth Fund at the IDC Financial Services Summit, held virtually on June 3, 2021. MDSap were Platinum Sponsors of the summit.
Further details of the CCH® Tagetik project, carried out in partnership with Fintra, were explained by MDSap Pre-Sales manager Ozan Azbazdar, and also by Baturhan Butur, the VP of the Financial Consolidation and Control department of the Turkey Wealth Fund. The Fund team worked hard to ensure the success of the project alongside the MDSap and Fintra teams. The CCH® Tagetik solution from MDSap partners Wolters Kluwer was the core product chosen to meet the needs of the Fund.
Ozan Azbazdar from MDSap explained more: “Wolters Kluwer’s CCH® Tagetik solution has nearly 1500 customers worldwide. In addition to consolidation, budget planning and forecasting, cash flow planning, financial modeling and reporting, which are under the umbrella of Corporate Performance Management, CCH® Tagetik also has ready solutions for IFRS9, IFRS16, IFRS17, and Solvency within the scope of regulation reporting. Wolters Kluwer/CCH® Tagetik has very important customers in Turkey including holdings, banks, and the private sector.”
The Wealth Fund itself is a relatively complex consolidation proposition, as Mr. Baturhan Butur from the Turkey Wealth Fund explained:
“The Turkey Wealth Fund was established in August 2016 under Law No. 6741 to contribute to Turkey’s development and economic stability by managing public assets more effectively and efficiently. We consolidate 17 large companies and banks in five different sectors. Each one is a holding company in its own right. The 17 companies also include companies established by us, private sector companies, and banks. In all, we consolidate 112 companies through full consolidation and about 60 companies via an equity method. It is the largest consolidation in Turkey, both qualitatively and quantitatively.”
Mr. Butur also explained that the regulatory environment for the Wealth Fund was complex and appropriately strict. Subject to independent audit, and appraised by one of the Big Four, the activity is scrutinized by a budget commission after the government agency oversees it. “So there are a lot of regulators and control mechanisms. Therefore, the Wealth Fund needed a tool that could support robust, transparent, and accountable reporting.”
Mr. Butur also explained that the Fund wanted an on-premise solution, rather than a cloud-based product, and they wanted to get on with financial management, their forte, rather than maintaining a code-based system in-house.
According to Nesrin’s introductory presentation, in the implementation of the Turkey Wealth Fund CCH® Tagetik consolidation, MDSap aimed to give the Fund what they wanted, with IFRS financials and footnotes received entirely through the application.
For this to work effectively, intercompany transactions from all subsidiaries – and subsidiaries of those subsidiaries – are transferred to the system with the mutual agreement being made on the system.
After these agreements, all subsidiaries load their data packages into the application in a controlled manner in the IFRS format, and the consolidated IFRS report is obtained via CCH® Tagetik. Inter-company eliminations and minority interest calculations are also performed automatically by CCH® Tagetik. At the end of all these operations, the consolidated IFRS report is ultimately disclosed by CCH® Tagetik Collaborative Office in Word format.
Now deployed and working with just three people taking care of daily operations, the project has led to immediate data and workflow benefits, as Mr. Butur from the Wealth Fund explains: “It made significant contributions to the processes of agreement, allowing portfolio companies to simultaneously see their balances with each other. Previously, we were managing this process on Excel.”
“All the companies had to have sent us their mutual balances to be able to see the difference. That could be a big problem; data immigration is also a challenging step in the process of transformation. We have now transferred data from all the years we’ve been in. So, we ended up creating a good database, and also had the opportunity to test structures of consolidation for the past year. We also defined certain levels of controls to ensure that unchecked data was never uploaded to the TWF.”
At the end of the case study presentation at the IDC Summit, Mr. Butur thanked the MDSap team in this way: “In fact, we know that the first key to a challenging implementation process is a good team and taking action to ensure that company needs are accurately identified and any scenarios that may occur can be considered in different discussions. Therefore, it has been a very efficient project for us in terms of tool, consultant, and team.”
Watch the whole online case study presentation, below (Turkish, with English subtitles.)