Excel Automation In Financial Services

A significant requirement in any business is to have variety of reports to be created and e-mailed on a
set frequency regularly. Microsoft Excel is a very powerful tool that enables users to capture, process,
present and report data in meaningful ways. Microsoft excel spreadsheet and models are predominantly
used across wide range of processes, from Investment research & Portfolio management to currency
trading & loan processing and for about everything in all business processes. As financial services
companies have traditionally relied on Excel as a reliable tool for these purposes and in the process have
amassed huge data as well as developed/evolved their business processes. At many places, many of the
components of these business processes are manual in nature, ranging from data capture, manipulation
to generation of reports. Excel automation allows these processes to ascend next level of organization
maturity by systemizing many of these tasks at the same time reducing the rate of error and data
accuracy significantly
There are several types of automation tools provided in the Excel Programming, which help the users to
execute complex business tasks within fraction of seconds and ensure better outcome. Excel Macros is
among the most highly ranked tools, which ensure systematic automation of jobs within limited time
frame. These days lot many of market data platform & custom internal applications have been
developed to imitate or substitute Microsoft excel over years, but still excel remains arguably the most
widely-used mission-critical application for financial services industry professionals.
Benefits of Excel and Business Process automation
1) Organizing & Data Comparisons – Organizing and data comparison can be easily done using the Excel
programming power giving benefits one after the other. Excel programming applications allow the user
to organize the lists and collate without any hassles. It also becomes far easier to analyze and separate
the rows and columns of data and bring phenomenal changes in the way and manner business can be
conducted.
2) Automated Daily status Reports – Excel as the ideal office and business automation application
engages daily status reports, monthly forecasting, or sales task. The updated Excel reports provide
business the very importance about making informed decision and that too within limited time frame.
Expert excel programmer can take power of excel to the next level where the applications turns out to
be a genie.
3) Dashboards – Excel based dash board helps in bringing marvelous change in the business performance
and as the result decision making process can be done quite efficiently. Excel based Dashboard reporting
brings with it, superb reporting power and you can easily create and maintain the dynamic reports. It is
through the dynamic reports that you will be able to navigate through the data as well as compare the
data from different sources. Dynamic reporting in excel also helps in the comparing the data from
several other sources over the timeframe. In short, Excel can bring complete change over in the office

Maturity capability Matrix
The level of excel automation adopted and used in an organization is directly proportionate to its
maturity. We have looked at many clients and prospects that have adopted business process
automation and have come up with following capability matrix:

A. Manual use of Excel – this is the most primitive level where organizations have used Excel to
store, process and report data. Typically in the start-up phase of an organization they resort to
this kind of approach, which normally last until they grow to tens of employees at which point
they consider to the next level:
B. Excel Automation – In this phase, organizations focus on optimization, data accuracy, faster
processing and standardizing business processes. They still rely on Excel as a primary business
process tool but with some degree of automation ranging from data capture, manipulation,
validation, and reporting.
C. Business Process Automation – As organizations grow more than 100 or so employees, they
soon find Excel approach (even with automation) unsustainable. Main disadvantages include
inability to be used by multiple people, operational risk by not storing data in systematic
fashion. They are left with this approach where they must systematically store data in some
repository, standardize data points as well as business process and implement data processing
using ETL tools and higher level languages like Python, C#, Web Services, SSIS et al.