Banks must comply with a growing array of national and international legislation and recommendations. But compliance is about more than just meeting the letter of the law. It's about ensuring transparency, mitigating risk, maintaining customer confidence, and enabling profitable growth. SAP solutions for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) support the banking industry's requirements to manage risk across the enterprise, increase business performance, and drive competitive advantage. To meet these objectives and ensure corporate sustainability, SAP solutions for GRC unify corporate strategy, risk management, and control initiatives across the extended enterprise.

SAP solutions give you the capabilities you need to meet and exceed the following key regulations and guidelines:

• Basel II – The New Basel Capital Accord, or Basel II, establishes requirements for banks to manage the risks of issuing loans. The regulation, which will go into effect by 2006, increases both the level of risk management and the required level of disclosure. As a result, it requires significant changes in policies, processes, and systems. SAP addresses these requirements through SAP Basel II, which can help you meet Basel II requirements for risk exposure and capital adequacy, and implement risk-mitigating supervisory review and disclosure processes.
• IAS – The International Accounting Standards (IAS) framework was adopted by the European Commission to increase transparency among companies operating in the European Union. The goal is to promote investor confidence and optimize working capital and risk management. IAS 32 and IAS 39 in particular establish rules for the valuation of financial instruments. SAP addresses these requirements through SAP Accounting for Financial Instruments, which enables banks to prepare IAS-compliant financial reports and create parallel financial statements based on a central data pool fed by the existing system landscape.
• SEPA compliance – The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) package from SAP is designed to help companies and banks meet the challenges of the SEPA framework as defined by the European Payment Council (EPC), improving straight-through processing and allowing increased transparency into payment flows.

Please visit SAP Solutions for Governance, Risk, and Compliance to review solutions that enable banks to manage operations risk across the enterprise.