Yuanhan Liu (Palau, Financial Institutions Commission (FIC)
The FIC establishes and maintains a financial and regulatory and supervisory system for the Republic of Palau.
For the past several years, the FIC had been using excel spreadsheets as their databases and they were wanting to expand its use of technology to better validate and process statistical data received from reporting institutions. To help the FIC with higher productivity and less room for error, the student consultant and FIC decided to outsource the database to a third party vendor for a more advanced and sustainable solution (which would take a few weeks). In the meantime, Yuanhan conducted careful investigation on data capture, collation and analysis process of the FIC and created the “Specification for Development” document. This document and meetings with the FIC would allow the FIC to understand how their database system works and develop technical capacity for negotiations with the vendors for the new system after Yuanhan left. Since a new system would take some time, Yuanhan also developed two independence applications and macros to automate the data entry process and to facilitate error checking and the detecting process. This greatly increased the work efficiency of the FIC and allowed the bank examiner more time to conduct risk analysis and compose reports during the transition period.
Yuanhan says that this was the best summer she has ever had and that this was a life-changing experience. From a project standpoint, she was able to help reduce the time dedicated to certain tasks from 30 days to one which she was truly happy about.