Banking on Confidence
Banking on ConfidenceWhen the Going Gets Tough, Good Institutions Get Even Tougher on Ensuring Regulatory Compliance
Sponsored by: While governments rally to bring some order to the worldwide economic crisis, customer confidence in the financial industry as a whole is waning.
Surviving institutions may indeed be thriving-or at least, safe and sound-but they still must prove to their customers and their regulators that they have their own houses in order. "People see banks as a secure, safe place and they want to believe that their personal data and financial assets are being taken care of," says Dwayne Melancon, Vice President of Corporate and Business Development for Tripwire, Inc., a provider of configuration control software based in Portland, OR. "But trust only goes so far."
That means institutions must be able to prove that they're doing all the right things; among other things, appropriately auditing and controlling the IT environment. Now, perhaps more than ever, an institution's mandatory compliance with government guidelines plays a crucial role in restoring customer confidence, one institution at a time.
Case Study: Rothschild Bank, ZurichAt Rothschild Bank in Zurich, compliance with banking and financial reporting regulations has been a challenge. The bank's diverse and distributed IT infrastructure made for poor visibility into who's doing what, especially at audit time. So it needed an automated, cost-efficient way to manage change and enforce accountability.
Teaming with Tripwire, Rothschild gained that much-needed visibility with 24x7 Now, perhaps more than ever, monitoring of change activity across multiple platforms. The Tripwire solution now an institution's mandatory allows the bank to detect unauthorized changes and reconcile those changes with regulations and known best practices-all without increasing headcount. compliance with government Rothschild also enjoys better response time to questionable changes and is much guidelines plays a crucial role in more prepared for compliance audits.
restoring customer confidence, Regulators Step Inone institution at a time. The worldwide financial ecosystem has been turned upside down, with governments from the Americas to the Pac Rim stepping in to help stabilize foundering economies.
In the U.S., the government is working out the details on a mammoth rescue plan. While in Europe, Germany's federal parliament passed the most extensive bailout package since post-war. And turmoil in Asia has resulted in similar efforts in South Korea's banking sector.
With such unprecedented upheaval and government intervention, all eyes are on compliance-which Banking on Confidence
will surely take on new meaning for the average consumer. "People are already skeptical Compliance Made Simple about compliance," says Melancon. "It's been around for a while, but we still hear about high-Tripwire solutions help simplify profile breaches involving huge amounts of cardholder data. not to mention everything in the the compliance conundrum. A key news surrounding the current financial crisis." requirement for successful compliance is that compliance becomes a continuous So an increase in oversight and accountability isn't a surprising turn of events in financial capability of the organization. With circles. "Financial institutions will face more government and industry-specific regulation, automated configuration and change management tools, institutions can and we expect to see an increase in corporate governance programs in an effort to restore quickly and cost-effectively produce consumer faith," says Brian Babineau, Senior Analyst for Milford, Mass.-based Enterprise "evidence on demand" to address any Strategy Group (ESG), an analyst firm providing strategic guidance to technology consumers, compliance requirement. vendors, venture capitalists, and institutional investors.
Tripwire's out-of-the-box configuration Whether it's the international standard of Basel II, or the more country-specific Sarbanes assessment policies reveal when settings Oxley in the U.S., the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) in Europe, the don't align with compliance requirements, Financial Instruments and Exchange Law (J-SOX) in Japan, or a host of other government industry best practices, and internal mandates, compliance is all about integrity and accountability... [download for more]
