Johannesburg-based Standard Bank has implemented BancWare Capital Manager's wholesale, retail, asset securitisation and consolidation models to help facilitate Basel II compliance across the group. The bank has also deployed BancWare Capital Manager for the Basel II standardized approach for operational risk. A SunGard customer since 1996, Standard Bank also uses SunGard's Adaptiv for credit risk and SunGard's FRONT ARENA for treasury management.

Under Basel II regulations, banks like Standard Bank with branches or subsidiaries in multiple countries must report to regulators in the country of their legal entity as well as the country of the branch location or the subsidiary. SunGard's BancWare Capital Manager helps Standard Bank to keep up with the regulatory changes across borders and to more efficiently manage the complexity of supporting multiple cross-border jurisdictions.

Using a data management tool to extract and transform data from diverse internal source systems (including SunGard's Adaptiv and FRONT ARENA) of operations in 38 countries, Standard Bank's Johannesburg-based headquarters will use BancWare to perform monthly regulatory capital calculations for a total of 148 legal entities. With transparency of data, the bank's regulators can see which jurisdictional rules have been applied, and how consolidation has been carried out.

Annelie Schnaar-Campbell, director, Group Risk Management for Standard Bank, said, "Our vision was always to deploy more than just a Basel II system. We wanted a solution to help enable effective risk measurement and monitoring to help improve our business. At the time that we had to select a tool, the Basel Accord was still being finalized and therefore there was not any tool that could be seen as fully compliant or matured. We needed a tool that could be enhanced with new Basel II functionality as the final document from the BIS became available. The SunGard software approach seemed flexible and able to provide quick turn-around on the required software updates."

As an existing customer of SunGard's Adaptiv, one of the key drivers in selecting BancWare Capital Manager was the good architectural fit. "We had a team of SunGard project management and SunGard consultants working on-site with the Standard Bank team for a period of 2 years. This meant that the SunGard staff came to have a good understanding of the Standard Bank environment and could address issues and concerns effectively."

Andreas Hug, managing director, EMEA for SunGard's BancWare business unit, said, "The success of this project is testimony to the true working partnership between SunGard and Standard Bank. SunGard's commitment to working with the bank and to providing consultants with expert knowledge of the software and business, in tandem with Standard Bank's dedicated and extensive Basel II team, demonstrate SunGard's strength in delivering regulatory compliant risk solutions."