A comprehensive and fully realized offering, the latest release helps banks face the new realities of compliance, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), real-time transactional banking and advanced risk analysis. Over 100 banks worldwide successfully run or are in the process of implementing the platform. The announcement was made at the SAP Financial Services Forum North America, being held in New York October 23-24, 2012.

"The future of transactional banking is service-oriented architecture-based systems," said Falk Rieker, global head, Industry Business Unit Banking, SAP. "The 8.0 release represents the type of forward-looking platform that today's banks need to better engage with their customers and drive innovation while reducing costs."

The latest release of banking services from SAP is the result of a long period of investment and cooperation with customers to deliver a comprehensive, end-to-end platform for key banking processes. It contains a comprehensive suite of financial tools that applies integration and analytics on top of risk and compliance and core banking, supported by over 1,000 trained consultants and experts. The latest release covers key capabilities for:

Flexible and extensive processing of deposits and loans products for retail and commercial banking, including advanced cash management, product bundling and relationship pricing
Advanced collateral handling for loans and mortgages
High-volume processing of payments
Proactive management of credit risk, including stress testing to meet changing regulations and help increase transparency of enterprise-wide risks
Comprehensive integrated accounting framework to help ensure full compliance with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and local accounting standards.
Rapid deployment: ready-to-use combinations of best-in-class software, pre-configured content and pre-defined services specifically tailored to the banking industry, enabling a faster, less risk-adverserisk-adverse implementation of new technology

Due to customer demand and the growth capabilities built into the latest release of banking services, new features within the platform are planned to be released throughout 2013.

SAP was recently positioned by Gartner Inc. in the leaders quadrant for international retail core banking and was cited as a market leader for both its "ability to execute" and "completeness of vision" (for more information, see "SAP Positioned as a Leader in Magic Quadrant for International Retail Core Banking 2012").