The just announced Basel III requirements mark a milestone of sorts for banks. There's now a lot more clarity on Tier 1 capital requirements, the types of assets that will count toward capital and the timeframe for compliance. It also marks a milestone for vendors that sell into financial services firms.

It seems that shareholders and regulators will be hyper-focused on compliance issues going forward. "One of the keys to maximizing the use of capital in this environment will be having best of class systems of internal control, data integrity, risk management and predictive analytics," Capgemini Financial Services' Craig Zander, a Practice Lead/Core Banking principal, tells FierceFinance.

"All of these programs rely on support from a strong applications framework that executes against a sound set of business requirements. To be effective, firms need to develop a holistic approach to enterprise risk management (ERM) that leverages integrated data management and analytics to measure their entire exposure and assess Basel III compliance, not only in the current environment, but also based on a series of stress test scenarios," Zander notes.

This is a great opportunity for executives in charge of such applications to bring ERM issues to the fore. It really underscores your value to organization.

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