INDUSTRY

Informatica Corporation today announced that its PowerCenter data integration platform will support IBM's new offering for banks and other financial services companies. The solution, IBM Risk and Compliance - Basel II Information Management Offering, will help banks and other financial services institutions improve their business operations, while giving them the tools to effectively manage information in a way that is consistent with the forthcoming Basel II Capital Accord. IBM's Basel II offering includes the DB2 Universal Database, DB2 Information Integrator, DB2 Cube Views and the IBM Banking Data Warehouse models. With over 250 joint PowerCenter and DB2 customers, Informatica PowerCenter will help financial services companies integrate disparate risk information in a timely fashion as part of IBM's Basel II reference architecture. "Building on our six-year relationship with IBM, Informatica's work to help IBM improve financial institutions' visibility into global risk is another indication of the synergy between our two companies and of Informatica's commitment to working with leading partners to deliver world-class industry-specific solutions to our customers," said Paul Albright, chief marketing officer at Informatica. "We're pleased to be part of this comprehensive risk management solution, which will benefit our existing financial services customers and extend our presence in this market as firms around the world continue to come to grips with risk and its global ramifications." Data integration is a fundamental building block for compliance with the global Basel II Capital Accord, which requires financial institutions to implement analysis of up to seven years of detailed historical risk data by 2006. With nine of the 10 largest global banks and 75 percent of the top 30 Global Fortune 500 financial services organizations using the Informatica data integration platform, Informatica is already working with several leading institutions to improve visibility into their risk exposures and address Basel II requirements. "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 Informatica PowerCenter 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." Basel II presents tremendous information technology challenges, including integrating and ensuring the quality of multiple terabytes of complex data sourced from potentially hundreds of systems and application. Customers of IBM's risk management solution for Basel II can use the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform to more easily manage Basel II requirements. Additionally, the Informatica platform is proven to accelerate integration development efforts in financial services environments through its metadata-driven engine, which supports auditability and reuse of integration processes, thus enabling institutions to optimally leverage their resources and navigate Basel II guidelines in the face of the 2006 deadline.