Software product of the year: Adaptiv, SunGard

If banks weren't aiming to manage their counterparty credit exposures and credit limits on a global basis before, Basel II gives them plenty of incentive to do that now. But it can be a huge task.

Take the merchant banking division of Belgium's Fortis Bank – in 10 trading centres, from Brussels to New York, it undertakes around 5,000 trades a day that it wants to check in real time against 15,000 limits for more than 5,200 counterparties. To achieve this, it requires a technology that is scalable, reliable, high performance and can operate around the clock, but at the same time can be integrated with a host of different trading and risk systems across the firm. Like a number of other