ECONOMICS

Ascential Software Corporation announced today that the Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite(TM) will support IBM's risk and compliance offering announced earlier today. The solution helps banks, brokerages, and other financial services companies manage the information management challenges presented by the New Capital Accord (Basel II). These solutions help organizations extend the benefits of compliance to help improve performance, reduce operations costs, and enhance service levels. "Today's announcement is the result of more than a year of Ascential Software and our longstanding partner, IBM, jointly providing risk management and Basel II solutions to the financial services industry. To date, our companies have more than 200 mutual customers, including Standard Chartered Bank, NYKredit, and Bank of China," said Pete Fiore, president, Ascential Software. "By solving their enormous data integration challenges, Ascential Software and IBM can help financial institutions measurably increase their working capital under the requirements of the Basel II global risk measurement and reporting regulations, while enhancing shareholder confidence in the financial stability of the institution, even in turbulent global markets." IBM's Basel II offering includes the DB2 database, DB2 Information Integrator, DB2 Cube Views and the IBM Banking Data Warehouse models. By including Ascential Software in the reference architecture for enterprise data integration in the IBM Risk and Compliance - Basel II Information Management Offering, IBM ensures that customers receive the market-leading solution for locating, standardizing and integrating risk-bearing data, regardless of data source or allowable latency. "We believe that IBM's Risk and Compliance - Basel II Information Management Offering provides customers with a broad set of resources, including IBM's comprehensive business intelligence and data warehouse framework, and the industry's premier consulting services," said Karen Parrish, vice president, IBM Business Intelligence. "Taking advantage of these resources to address industry regulations like BASEL is an opportunity for businesses to become more streamlined and strategic. We believe that Ascential Enterprise Integration Suite as a component of our offering will contribute to our objective of helping customers move the right information to the right person at the right time." "The strain of today's regulatory environment is particularly onerous for financial institutions," said Deborah Williams, group vice president, Capital Markets & Corporate banking for Financial Insights, an IDC company that provides independent research and custom consulting services to address technology issues and challenges facing the financial services industry. "While these regulations demand unified holistic reporting, the fragmented, disparate IT structure of most financial institutions makes compliance difficult at best. We have long stated that the key to effective risk management is effective data management and new regulatory requirements are all but impossible without a stable, yet flexible, data infrastructure layer." Specifically, Ascential and IBM can help financial institutions address compliance mandates and manage risk through: -- Jointly Defined Software Reference Architecture serving as the foundation for building successful Basel II implementations. -- Gap Analysis to identify missing data elements between what's needed for Basel II compliance and what's immediately available. -- Automated Source System Profiling, needed to assess the content and structures of available data within a bank or institution, and map the required data integration paths. -- Integrated Data Quality and Standardization, to align data from disparate sources, regardless of structure, and transform it to standardized, enterprise-wide structures. This capability is critical to ensuring that risk calculations are based on accurate data and that an institution does not misreport its risk exposure. -- Data Transformation to expose and deliver this information to target databases for risk assessment. -- Parallel Processing for big-data batch and real-time processing, necessary for batch-processing large data volumes within tight windows, and to deliver trickle-feed processing to support intra-day risk analysis. -- Inherent Data Audit Trail, necessary to capture and document data sources, integration routines and risk assessment necessary to justify minimum levels of capital reserves. -- Integration Methodologies and service offerings that leverage Ascential Software's experience in hundreds of enterprise integration engagements. -- Data Models, facilitating organization, mapping and alignment of enterprise data to IBM's Banking Data Warehouse.