IRB models you can defend on demand
Under ex-post supervision, the ECB gives banks speed on material IRB model changes in exchange for total internal accountability. Yields gives risk and validation teams the industrial-grade governance to move fast and prove, internally, that they are still inside the regulatory lines.
Trusted by leading financial institutions including HSBC, BNP Paribas, Euroclear, and Banco do Brasil.
The context
What ex-post supervision changes
Internal Ratings-Based models are the engine of modern banking, letting institutions use their own data to calculate capital requirements. For years, material improvements sat in a long approval queue, waiting for a dedicated on-site investigation before they could go live. The ECB's move to ex-post supervision changes that: banks can implement a material change shortly after submitting a complete application, and the supervisor reviews afterwards.
The catch is accountability. The flexibility is granted only if your internal control function can give a credible confirmation that the model is compliant before go-live, and changes that lower risk weights sit under a capital floor until a targeted investigation is complete. The safety net of an up-front ECB review is gone, so anything broken when it goes live is your problem until the on-site investigation picks it up. The more flexibility the ECB grants, the more internal infrastructure you need to use it responsibly. That is where Yields comes in.
The Yields approach
How Yields gets you ex-post ready
The reform is, in effect, a maturity test. Banks with strong governance, automated evidence, and continuous monitoring pull ahead. Banks running model risk on spreadsheets and email threads find the new framework does not give them what they hoped for. Yields is the single source of truth that makes credible internal confirmation achievable, combining robust governance and technology rather than evidence alone. Here is how it works.
Automated evidence and a full audit trail
Credible confirmation is not a sign-off email or a single PDF. It is the demonstrable result of a governance process a supervisor can interrogate after the fact. Yields automates the collection of evidence and manages the full governance workflow, so your internal control function can generate the required confirmation with a complete, unalterable audit trail behind it.
Traceable, reproducible validation
The supervisor must be able to follow the chain from final sign-off back to the first data extract, not a summary, but the actual trail. Yields links validation evidence to the specific model version it refers to and lets you reproduce a historical run with the exact data and parameters used at the time, so evidence survives staff turnover and stands up to a targeted investigation.
Proactive outlier detection
The ECB focuses its on-site investigations on models that show outlier behaviour or weakness in a changing macroeconomic environment. Yields provides real-time monitoring and performance dashboards, so you detect drift, deterioration, and anomalies internally, before they become a regulatory red flag.
Automatic materiality classification
The EBA has recalibrated the thresholds that decide whether a change is material. Classification logic that grew up in spreadsheets and team conventions is now out of date, and getting it wrong means either over-notifying and wasting resources or under-notifying and creating regulatory risk. Yields classifies model changes using consistent, quantitative thresholds, so the right changes go through the streamlined notification process and validation effort concentrates on the most critical ones.
Independent, recent, and owned confirmation
Confirmation is only credible when it reflects the model as it is now, comes from a function separate from the model owner, and has a named owner with the authority to refuse it. Yields structures roles and workflows so separation of duties, recency, and clear ownership are built into the process rather than reconstructed under pressure.
Automated evidence, traceable validation, real-time monitoring, and quantitative materiality classification. The industrial-grade governance that turns autonomy into an advantage.
See it in action →Rethink your IRB perimeter
Should every IRB model still be IRB?
The reform carries a second-order question that is easy to miss. Autonomy costs internal infrastructure, and the cost of running IRB-grade governance is roughly fixed per model. So the return is highest for portfolios that are large, material, and rich in data, and lowest for those that are small, niche, or data-thin. The ECB is using this moment to encourage banks to focus IRB on strategic loan portfolios and to shift smaller or operationally heavy portfolios toward the Standardised Approach.
Many banks still run IRB models that exist for historical reasons rather than strategic ones. Yields gives you the inventory and risk-tiering view to answer the perimeter question with evidence: for each model, whether the capital saving over Standardised justifies the cost of IRB-grade governance today. Skip the question, and you keep paying the governance cost for models that no longer earn it.
Why Yields
Turn autonomy into an advantage
Under ex-post supervision, model validation stops being the bottleneck and becomes the gatekeeper of speed. If validation is fast and trustworthy, the bank captures the upside. If it is slow or thin, the shift changes very little in practice. Yields gives risk and validation teams the automation, traceability, and monitoring to make internal confirmation credible by default, so you can move at the speed the framework allows while proving, at any moment, that you are inside the lines.
Single source of truth for IRB governance, evidence, and monitoring
Automated validation and unalterable audit trails per model change
Real-time outlier detection and quantitative materiality classification
Move faster on IRB, and prove you are still inside the lines
Yields gives you the automated evidence, traceable validation, and real-time monitoring that credible internal confirmation depends on, so ex-post supervision becomes an advantage rather than a risk. Built for the way IRB supervision works now, and ready whenever a targeted investigation arrives.