Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh Implements Rockall’s Collateral Management System

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh has rolled out Rockall Technologies' (Dublin) Systematic Tracking of Collateral (STOC) solution, becoming the sixth Federal Home Loan Bank System institution to select the tool for the management of the liquid assets and mortgage collateral pledged to secure low-cost loans to member banks.

Robert Kovach, director of collateral services at FHLBank Pittsburgh, noted in a statement announcing the implementation, "We needed a platform that would minimize both operational risk and credit risk. We also wanted to streamline and automate our approach to generating accurate and timely information for internal auditors and to satisfy bank examiners' requirements. Rockall gave us all that and more."

In the statement, Rockall CEO Luke Nestor cited Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake's May 5 address to Congress as evidence that the country's top regulatory body regards collateral management as an essential and core capability of banking.

According to the vendor, which provides collateral management solutions to the financial services industry, STOC gives financial institutions the enterprisewide, real-time operational capability to value, monitor and manage collateral of all types and for all lines of business. Rockall noted in the release that STOC's features include automated management, tracking and valuation of portfolios of mixed whole-loan and securities collateral; seamless integration with other banking systems, securities custodians and market pricing systems; accurate, immediate evaluation of lending positions, exposures, loan-to-value, loan-to-margin and concentration levels; detection of policy exceptions and instantaneous generation of alerts; and eligibility analyses based on predetermined policies and valuations from multiple market sources, with application of "haircuts" as specified.