By: David Etter, Managing Director Bennington Partners/Sheshunoff Consulting + Solutions
We are very pleased to announce that Bennington Partners/Sheshunoff Consulting + Solutions (“BP/SCS”) will be upgrading our integrated work-papers solution in July of 2021. This move to a new system will result in benefits to both our clients as well as improvements “behind the scenes” within BP/SCS.
Our current work-papers system is an Access based distributed database wherein each of our review staff has a copy of the database on their encrypted laptop. Upon completion of their work, they submit a copy of the database which is then re-integrated with versions from the other reviewers on the project, to obtain one complete set. This combined database resides on the BP/SCS servers in our co-location in Texas. Note: All of the above processes are included in the SOC 1 report dated December 31, 2020 for BP/SCS and the SOC II report for Lightedge (the co-location facility).
The new work-paper system will be SQL based, and will be located on the BP/SCS server. Our review staff will access the server and work directly in the database. This provides many advantages over the current distributed system.
Advantages to the clients include:
- Improved turnaround time. No longer dependent upon the movement of databases from the individual review staff to the main office for re-integration in order to obtain updated reports and details on reviews.
- Improved Information Security
- While the current system uses encrypted laptops and Move-it for secure FTP, the new work-paper system will reside only on the BP/SCS server.
- Reviewer access to the server will be governed by Multi Factor Authentication.
- BP/SCS will still use Move-it to transmit data to / from the Clients
- Enhanced reporting
- Move from “note centric” to “Borrower centric” line-sheets. Multiple loans to one Borrower will now be combined into one line-sheet. (Note: Multiple Borrowers in a relationship will still require multiple line-sheets)
- Improved line-sheet with more detail
- Clients have asked for “Can you show me all the exceptions for one Borrower in one place rather than having to review multiple reports?”. The answer is now Yes, we can. This enhanced reporting will be delivered daily during the review.
Starting in Late May, the pre-review calls will include a discussion of the new system to make sure the Client is fully aware of the report changes/enhancements. There should be very little, if any, impact on the Client regarding the new system requirements. Please feel free to call us if you would like to discuss this or have any questions.