A-Team Insight Exchange is a new event series for 2010, which will combine A-Team’s expertise in financial markets IT with thought leadership from world-class technology innovators and practical experience from financial market practitioners.
The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) has this week been forced to back down somewhat in its aggressive approach to introducing further changes to its liquidity risk regime in light of the current economic climate. As promised last year, the regulator has assessed the state of the market and decided not to push ahead with the quantitative aspects of its regime, namely the controls around liquid asset buffers.

















As noted by A-Team Insight last month (see
Next month, industry practitioners will have four opportunities to provide feedback to the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) on its risk related proposals, including those around concentration risk and stress testing. The regulatory body has organised four separate hearings at its London premises to garner feedback on a number of its recent consultation papers, all of which involve technology and systems considerations.
There may be troubles ahead for the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) with the impending departure of current CEO Hector Sants in the summer, but, in the meantime, the regulator has pledged to support the data vendor community in adapting to the new regulatory order. To this end, the regulator is strengthening its efforts around its independent software vendor (ISV) discussion group, which aims to provide vendors with a forum in which to air their issues.
As part of its drive to compel financial services firms to provide more transparency into their data, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has confirmed this week that it will require UK firms to publish information on how they handle complaints. According to the regulator, this will help people see how firms are performing in this area and to drive up complaints handling standards across the industry. It will also pose another data challenge for firms already facing new requirements around risk data reporting and single customer view (SCV) reforms (see
The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) has indicated that is "disappointed" by the "unclear articulation" of firms’ risk appetites in the Internal Capital Adequacy Assessment Process (ICAAP) submissions it has received from investment firms so far. The regulator indicates that these firms should bear a number of factors in mind when preparing for their next submissions, including providing the right level of risk related data in order to the FSA to be able to accurately judge their risk management capabilities.
Many US firms are taking action to get ready early for the introduction of XBRL tags for financial statements later this year, according to a recent survey by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and standards body XBRL US. A total of 73% of the 215 respondents had already begun their testing for the XBRL format in November last year, when the survey was carried out. Moreover, the majority of respondents, at 93%, had at least a basic knowledge of XBRL.



