From: Financial Times
By Paul Solman
For leaders in the financial sector, one of the frequent reminders of the 2008 credit crisis is the mountain of new rules they face in their day-to-day operations.
Storage capacity is just the beginning, as financial services are having to turn to increasingly sophisticated technology to satisfy the demands of compliance.
“The role of IT has become even more central than it was in the past, and chief technology officers are increasingly working with chief financial officers and compliance officers to improve processes,” says Said Tabet, senior technologist and industry standards strategist at EMC, a data storage company.
He adds: “High levels of automation, for example, are being used to improve business processes and to deal with problems such as human error.”
One of the biggest problems is data quality. Jamie Woodhouse, managing director of finance and risk services at Accenture UK and Ireland, the IT services group, points out that the global nature of banking operations means a great deal of work has to be done to ensure that all data are compatible and meet the same standards.
“In theory, the regulatory reporting problem is very simple, but in practice the complexity is bewildering,” Mr Woodhouse says. “When you start looking at the data sets, you recognise that the source data are in many different systems, in many different regions and countries, and is being managed by lots of different groups with slightly different reasons for wanting to look at it.”
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