From February 2015 until March 2018, project management to implement the EU PRIIPs regulation was accomplished for Erste Group Bank AG – a leading Austrian banking group.

The aim of the project was to provide the entire banking group with the necessary IT-related and organizational prerequisites – both in Austria and in all EU countries in which the banking group operates – equipping the group prior to the entry into force of the regulation on January 1, 2018.

The project formed part of a comprehensive MiFID II program of the banking group.

In addition to the classic PM tasks such as: project planning (budgetary, schedule / milestones, resource-wise), project controlling and reporting to the project sponsor and other stakeholders, this project also included alignment and coordination with the banking subsidiaries’ local project managers and their teams.

Separately, the group’s Holding project team in Vienna (consisting of employees from the business departments, external consultants, as well as the bank IT division) was managed.

Finally, not only tendering procedures were carried out to select appropriate data- and service providers, but also contract negotiations with the selected suppliers were organized involving the legal and purchasing departments of the banking group. In cooperation with the IT department (ITIL based) SLAs were drafted and aligned to establish proper contractual relationships between the Holding and the local subsidiaries of the banking group.

Comprehensive business analysis, the legal requirements of the PRIIPs regulation were compared with the organizational and IT systemic realities of the bank to elaborate the necessary guidelines and standards for successfully implementing the PRIIPS regulation group-wide.

As the PRIIPs regulation should have taken effect by January 1, 2017, but was postponed by one year by the EU Commission late in 2016, all the major objectives to allow for compliance by end of 2016 had already been put in place. 2017 was thus characterized by adjusting and optimizing the solutions and processes implemented to comply with the anticipated changes to the regulation. By December 2017 / January 2018 the project had successfully gone live across all involved members of the banking group. From January 2018 until March 2018 the post-go-live phase was conducted – including handover activities to several production teams, a formal project close-down, and finally the decommissioning of the project team and the PM as well.