FSA awards £6.5m contract for electronic reporting system

New system will ease regulatory burden on 28,000 financial services companies while tightening compliance

FSA appoints Capgemini in £6.5m deal to build bespoke IT system

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has awarded a £6.5m contract to IT services provider Capgemini to design and build its new mandatory electronic reporting (MER) system.

MER will reduce the regulatory burden on the financial services industry by making regulatory reporting simpler and easier, while tightening compliance by improving the accuracy, consistency and availability of information in the FSA.

The system, scheduled for implementation from July 2008, will include the flexibility to more easily amend the reporting required as new legislation takes effect or the scope of the FSA’s activities changes.

Benefits of the new system include the scalability to handle expansion in the numbers and types of organisations within the FSA’s regulatory remit, beyond the current total of some 28,000 businesses.

The bespoke MER system will replace disparate IT systems inherited from the FSA’s various predecessor regulators, and is expected to increase efficiency by substantially reducing paperwork and clerical processing.

The project is the first major piece of work to be contracted under a long-term application delivery framework signed between the FSA and Capgemini in July 2006.

Capgemini will deploy service-oriented architecture technology in designing MER and will integrate the new system with the FSA’s IT architecture.

The majority of Capgemini’s 60-strong project team will be based at the supplier's application development centre in Mumbai, India.