(openPR) - Luxembourg, London & Seoul, 11 March 2008 – FERNBACH, a leading provider of solutions for IFRS accounting and Enterprise-wide Value and Risk Management, has entered into a partnership with auditing company SAMIL PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Korean member firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. The partnership involves the establishment of an IFRS Center of Excellence in Seoul, South Korea, to train, educate and prepare banks for IFRS compliance. The FERNBACH solution FlexFinance® IFRS has already been installed in the center and will be used as a reference point from which banks in the Asia/Pacific region can validate their IFRS strategies.

In 2011, the adoption of accounting practices in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) will become mandatory in Korea. The standards-compliant FERNBACH solution FlexFinance® IFRS for double-entry bookkeeping will enable South Korean financial institutions to perform accurate and state-of-the-art accounting procedures and to drastically reduce project costs and risks thanks to pre-defined templates and optimum transparency.

The primary goal of the IFRS Excellence Centre is to support banks in adopting the new accounting standard (IFRS). The migration towards IFRS is a complex process requiring in-depth knowledge, expertise and experience. The Centre of Excellence will assist banks in Korea and the entire Asia/Pacific region to validate their IFRS strategies through scenario testing with real software, FlexFinance® IFRS, which is already live in numerous sites around the world including ICBC (Asia), Mizuho, Commerzbank, HSBC and NORD/LB amongst others.

This centre also focuses upon training with a heavy emphasis on real-live situations. Experiences with numerous clients in Europe clearly demonstrated a knowledge gap not addressed in the market until now, between theoretical implementations and actual hands-on experience. FlexFinance® IFRS is delivered with predefined templates which allow bank to quickly identify the mandatory data and therefore to define a data quality ratio, which is invaluable especially when conducting gap analyses.

Jae-Sik Kim, a partner of SAMIL PwC, said, “FlexFinance® IFRS provides us with the ideal mix between an integrated package which supports all essential features such as delta approach to handling large volume of data, product splitting or automatic generation of credit and debit entries and also an impressive list of predefined templates with are very useful for optimising and securing fast implementation for all projects.”

Arnaud Picut, Director of Asia/Pacific Region at FERNBACH-Software, said, “This IFRS Excellence Centre is the convergence between highly qualified consultants in accounting and our fully compliant IFRS accounting generator. IFRS is a complex topic which requires more than just a package; it requires experts in various domains to complete the adoption of IFRS. SAMIL PwC is capable of delivering such resources during a project.”

For more details please contact:

FERNBACH-Software S.A.
Emma Connolly (Director of Group Marketing)
1a, Parc d'activité Syrdall
L-5365 Munsbach

Tel.: + 352 / 40 22 44 - 1
Fax: + 352 / 40 22 44 - 310

About FERNBACH:

FERNBACH has developed the solution offering FlexFinance®, which is based upon a sophisticated methodology called EVRM. EVRM is a vision and a solution for the integration of risk management, risk and regulatory requirements, balance sheet reporting and controlling within financial institutions.

The EVRM methodology is built upon a meta level data repository which collects all data from the banking and trading books and stores this centrally while simultaneously standardising and enriching the data. This centralised meta repository of financial transactions guarantees single calculation of all financial ratios ensuring perfect alignment and reconciliation so that the data can be used for purposes such as Basel II, IAS/IFRS (Multi-GAAP), Liquidity, Profitability, Regulatory Reporting, etc. The entire process is transparent and fully auditable as uniquely the data can be traced back to the deal level. This advanced approach also enables the bank to cost-effectively implement new requirements as they occur such as ICAAP.