Informatica Perspectives

According to a recent FT.com article, US lawmakers are seeking to expand the reach of anti-money laundering regulations after a Senate investigation found that hundreds of millions of dollars in suspect foreign funds have been able to land in the US. As we can see, money laundering and terroristic financing continues to rise despite the huge investments banks have made in packaged Anti-Money Laundering (AML) software, custom built solutions through global system integrators, re-engineered business process, people, and policies.  How can this be? Were these bad investments to begin with or is there something else causes these issues? [Read more]

Komerční banka.

Fresh off a flight from London, Dave Schrader, our friend from Teradata, alerted me that our joint Teradata-Informatica customer, Komerční banka, a Société Générale bank, won the prestigious, EMEA Business Intelligence Award 2010 at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit!

In their press release,
http://www.kb.cz/en/com/press/releases/781.shtml

Pavel Čejka, Komerční banka Executive Director, Strategy and Finance, comments on the great benefits of BI: "I believe that one of the strengths of financial management at KB is the existence of a unified database and performance indicators, which are interconnected and focused not only on financial data, which I consider to be a matter of course, but also on business, product, risk, operating and other information."

Teradata and Informatica were highlighted as part of the first-class technologies in the project. It involved the implementation of user metadata and an information quality program. [Read more]

Back in June 2009, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) published Financial Accounting Statements No. 166, Accounting for Transfers of Financial Assets, and No. 167, Amendments to FASB Interpretation No. 46(R), which changes the way entities account for securitizations and special-purpose entities. The new standards will impact financial institution balance sheets beginning in 2010 and will require substantive changes to how banks account for many items, including securitized assets that had been previously excluded from these organizations' balance sheets. Banks affected by the new accounting standards will be subject to higher risk-based regulatory capital requirements. So what does it all mean and how much will it cost banks to comply?  [Read more]