CSC forms risk management consortium

IT services giant Computer Sciences (CSC) plans to help firms manage risks and improve processes via a new consortium.

Called Risk Constellation, the group brings together risk management software and consulting firms to address looming risks from a variety of sources and make them visible on dashboards for chief executives and other managers. Initially aimed at financial services firms, CSC plans to later introduce the solution to other sectors.

“This is not just a technology brought in to satisfy regulations but offers value opportunities running into hundreds of millions of pounds,” said Charles Lewis, CSC director of global services.

Anita Bradshaw, a financial services risk management expert at CSC, said that by collaborating with smaller developers, CSC would be able to speed time to market of such solutions.

“That’s going to be a theme moving forward,” she said. “It’s a way of bringing exciting developments to market very, very quickly. People have been doing risk management in silos and we’re looking across a company to aggregate risk and display a picture for someone at the top of the company to look at risk, as well as providing views for operations managers too.”

CSC said firms should use “supercompliance” policies whereby they address process issues and visibility on top of necessary regulatory compliance work.

“A lot of firms think there are unquantifiable risks but I don’t think there is such a thing as an unquantifiable risk in financial services,” Bradshaw said. “I firmly believe this emperor has very few clothes.”

A spokesman for consortium member ZYen said, “A lot of banks clearly don’t use the data they collect [and their efforts] so far have been purely at the level of compliance but you can save thousands of dollars per day in clearing. With aberrant trades, if it’s only spotted three days later it’s been forgotten.”