Compliance Newsflashes: SEC and FSA Sign Information Sharing Agreement, and more

SEC And FSA Sign Regulatory Cooperation Arrangement

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.K.'s Financial Services Authority (FSA) signed a comprehensive arrangement to increase cooperation in market oversight and supervision.

SEC chairman Christopher Cox and FSA CEO John Tiner executed the agreement at a meeting at SEC headquarters in Washington. This arrangement will facilitate the exchange of confidential supervisory information currently collected by both regulators.

"Both the SEC and the FSA share a commitment to keeping our markets open, fair, transparent, and sound under constantly changing circumstances. The additional tools for information exchange that we will gain from this arrangement will enhance our mutual ability to oversee the world's largest securities firms and markets," said Cox in a release. "This arrangement also facilitates the SEC's new role as a consolidated supervisor of globally active US investment banks. The information sharing arrangements we are formalizing today will help insure that the SEC's supervision of these firms is as effective as possible."

Among other things, the arrangement provides for exchange of information about regulated entities and investment banking groups that operate both in the United States and the United Kingdom.

SunGard Acquires Dataware Solutions

SunGard has acquired Dataware Solutions, Inc., a provider of automated personal trading, code of ethics and employee compliance solutions for financial institutions. Dataware Solutions will become part of SunGard's Protegent compliance, surveillance and suitability solutions business. The transaction, the terms of which have not been disclosed, is not expected to have a material impact on SunGard's financial results.

"Dataware Solutions brings expertise and a proven application that will help us to meet the proactive compliance needs of broker/dealers, investment advisors, hedge funds and money managers," said Paul Erickson, president of SunGard's Protegent business unit, in a release. "Adding Dataware Solutions to Protegent will help us extend employee compliance capabilities to organizations that need better risk controls but do not have the time or expertise to build a solution themselves."

SunGard provides a set of compliance and risk mitigation solutions that encompass risk management, surveillance, supervision, regulatory and ethics monitoring. Leveraging SunGard's Common Services Architecture, compliance components can be rapidly deployed alongside or embedded within line-of-business systems and orchestrated to provide an enterprise-wide view. SunGard also provides regulatory and compliance consulting services that are designed to help senior executives at financial institutions assess the quality and substance of their risk and compliance programs.

Protiviti Partners With RiskBusiness to Enhance Support of Operational Risk Programs for Basel II

Risk consultancies Protiviti Inc. and RiskBusiness International Ltd. Have signed a technology agreement to help financial institutions and other organizations identify, manage and ultimately reduce operational risks and exposure related to Basel II, Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory compliance activities,

Protiviti has enhanced its Operational Risk Management (ORM) Portal with a feature set of risk indicators that will provide clients with the capability to identify, measure, monitor and report on prioritized risks, and track performance of business processes and related controls. The technology agreement combines the ORM Portal with access to RiskBusiness' KRIeX library of content to enable organizations to more effectively measure and benchmark key risk indicators.

"As more banks and insurance firms recognize the value of standardized indicators and the benefits of benchmarking their own indicator values against their peers, the online access and reporting functionality provided by the ORM Portal will be a crucial differentiating factor to KRI Library subscribers," explained Mike Finaly, managing director of RiskBusiness, in the release.

Protiviti's ORM Portal was first released in the summer of 2005. The enhanced ORM Portal v2.1, featuring the new key risk indicator functionality with direct access to RiskBusiness' KRIeX library, will be available to Protiviti clients in March 2006.

NetEconomy Signs 12, Opens New Offices

NetEconomy, a provider of real-time enterprise risk monitoring solutions for the finance industry, has signed 12 new customers to its ERASE Financial Crime Suite solution to detect and deter fraud, market abuse, money laundering and terrorist financing schemes.

Among the new customers are Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), Close Private Bank, Bank Muscat, Bank of Baroda, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Dexia Investor Services, and AXA Banque France.

"Enhancing compliance effectiveness is a key initiative for our organization in 2006," stated Jason Monaghan from Close Private Bank, in a release. "Realizing the inherent benefits of aligning our compliance practices with risk management, we needed a partner who could support our vision with the right technology. NetEconomy's financial crime suite arms us to effectively detect and prevent an array of financial crime activity without the cost and resource burden of implementing and managing disparate tools for individual crime areas."

In addition to the new customer wins, NetEconomy has also opened new offices in Paris and New York City. These new regional offices house expert enterprise risk management sales and support staff whose mission is to help customers align their compliance and financial crime fighting initiatives to streamline operations and increase transparency to meet growing regulatory, government and industry mandates.