The Regulatory and Risk practice helps customers increase transparency, improve efficiencies and mitigate risk. It helps organizations analyze business practices, staff competencies, technology platforms and third party arrangements to assess readiness and address gaps within compliance and risk programs, and technology and data infrastructures.

With constantly changing regulations, compliance officers must keep up to date on regulations and provide quick responses to regulatory requirements. In a post-crisis industry, bank, trust and brokerage organizations must also manage the impact of counterparty risk. By assessing business process management, risk management, reporting and compliance programs and technology, firms will be better prepared to address shortfalls, improve efficiencies and service and reduce risk. Financial reform and risk management initiativesmay also generate new opportunities and challenges in managing cross-platform information and delivering on-demand data and real-time metrics in order to respond to queries from regulators, management and clients.

Rodney Nelsestuen, senior research director, Financial Strategies & IT Investments at TowerGroup, said, "Spending on technology will be largely devoted to addressing regulatory requirements in 2011, but vendors must help to identify and articulate other strategic and business value these IT investments offer that may not be immediately evident. Top trends in technology in financial services must be tempered by a deep understanding of both the business value of the technology and the pure efficacy of the technology itself as it will fit, or not, in a given FSI's architecture. In order for technology vendors to succeed, they will need unprecedented domain expertise in addition to IT, business process, and corporate strategy acumen."

Melissa Cullen, executive vice president for SunGard's wealth managementbusiness, said, "Risk and regulatory compliance can impact nearly every operational prtional process and technology platform in banks, brokerage and trust firms. Within thecoming years, financial services institutions will continue to face a multitude of regulatory and accounting changes. At the same time they will need to control systemic, counterparty and financial risk, and increase efficiencies and service. By offering a consulting practice staffed by subject matter experts with deep domain knowledge, SunGard is able to help customers assess their specific risk and regulatory challenges, while also implementing solutions to address these challenges within the required timelines."