IBM Preps New Basel II Tool

As the deadline for Basel II compliance nears, IBM’s business intelligence solutions group is readying a new DB2-based tool to help financial institutions comply.

Karen Parrish, vice president of World Wide Sales for IBM’s Business Intelligence Solutions, told eWEEK.com that Big Blue, of Armonk, N.Y., is preparing templates that will help Basel II-affected companies respond to the regulation’s requirements. IBM has not yet released details on what the product will be named, nor on a ship date or pricing.

Basel II is a set of regulations that establishes how such companies should report on cash and credit risks, to ensure against loss that results from faulty internal processes, people or systems, or from external events. The regulation comes from the Basel Committee, a group of 10 countries that includes the United States.

Full Basel II compliance will be required by the end of 2006. At this point, financial institutions are in the process of revamping their internal systems, supervisory processes and reporting processes.

IBM already provides data-warehousing models for specific industries that are structured to feed data into the data warehouse. In the case of a bank, a data warehouse feeds off of data from sources including investment services or credit card divisions, for example. Data housed in a bank’s data warehouse then has to be reported on according to regulatory requirements.

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