BALM has its genesis in Basel recommendations of management of interest rate risk. Objectives of BALM are
	Measurement of liquidity risk
	Measurement of Interest rate risk
	Central Bank Compliance
	Balance Sheet Management

BALM ARCHITECTURE Liquidity module of Balm provides following features;
	ALCO review graphs and text reports of liquidity gaps across user defined maturity spectrum
	Drill down by the day for a year, monthly thereafter Cost to close-out gaps 'what if' screen
	Tolerance Analysis based on % of gaps
	Drill down to items contributing to stress in maturity buckets
	Compares cash flow mismatches against tolerance limit
	Highlights maturity buckets that are under stress
Interest rate risk module provides following features;
	ALCO review graphs and text reports of gaps in interest rate sensitive items
	Drill down by day for a year, by month thereafter
	Net Interest Income (NII) and Net Interest Margin (NIM) sensitivity analysis for change in interest rates of both costs and yields
	Tolerance analysis of gaps in % terms
	Drill down to items creating stress
	Average yield, cost graphs and reports

Central Bank Compliance
Central bank compliance reporting changes from country to country. Currently, India is completely covered. We are discussing with central bank authorities in Nigeria and Malaysia to formalise central bank reporting in respect of Asset liability management based on Basel I. BALM currently envisages complete compatibility to Basel II recommendations and work has commenced in that direction.

Balance Sheet Management
Balance sheet ratios are commonly used measurement for control purposes. Taking a cue from many specific reports being requested by users, BALM has a user defined ratio builder screen. This is an extremely friendly feature received well by all users. This facilitates definition using all items defined to ALM sheet and arithmetic functions. A user exit for more complex functions is available if required. In addition, a desired value, comparsion type (equal, greater than et. al.) is defined as well. During data upload, if limits are breached, alerts are sent to designated users regarding breach of ratio limits.

Trends may be plotted at will by user. One may choose from a set of assets and liabilities or even ratios. Currently restricted to line graphs, type of graph is being parameterised in the next version. A regression based forecasting model is available.

Data interface
Several banks still have distributed architecture and diverse systems. Growth by acquisition, multiple vendor systems based on specialisation all add to complexity and number of systems that a bank has. BALM has a comprehensive data interface unit. This has been tested in many conditions with multiple transaction systems supporting bank branches, one using distributed and the other centralised architectures. We are extending data interfaces to XML document type definitions while retaining flat file architectures as well.