SunGard appoints Nayak to head its Basel II business unit

A leading solutions provider for financial services has appointed a head of product development to its Basel II BancWare business unit.

A major solutions provider to the financial industry has promoted its former head of product development for the company’s Basel II solution as the director of its Basel II business unit.

Suhas Nayak will oversee the development of SunGard’s BancWare Capital Manager, a modelling and analysis solution that allows firms to meet regulatory requirements and develop risk management approaches to manage economic capital.

Nayak said that he intends to keep SunGard’s philosophy towards Basel II solutions. “Our goal is to give a bank vendor independence, even if it means independence from us,” he said. “SunGard has made a system that’s transparent. The flexibility of the system means that the user can change rules without programming. We put the power of the model in the hands of the business user, not in IT.”

The strength of the system relies on the user’s ability to change single parameters, allowing for different rules to be taken into consideration. “SunGard has made a system that’s flexible to adapt to other jurisdictions. Risk professionals in a firm can solve any problem themselves by changing one parameter. This is what an international Tier I bank has done with our system – they can change or implement regulation without the assistance of SunGard.”

Nayak said banks have come a long way as a result of Basel II, especially when it comes to incorporating a culture of risk management. “Risk management is more of an attitude than a system, and these attitudes start at the top. Basel II is forcing banks to push for this attitude,” he said.

In related news, SunGard will shortly release the results of its Pillar II survey. According to SunGard, the survey finds that while most responding institutions are still in the early planning stages, it also determines that many banks recognise the business benefits of measuring previously unrecognised risks, and that they plan to use these measures for risk-adjusted decision-making across business lines.

SunGard surveyed 61 banks from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, the Asia-Pacific region and Japan to gauge their Pillar II aims and progress, especially with regard to the risk-and-capital systems that lie at the heart of Pillar II compliance. The full results will be online from next week.

BaselAlert.com