Better use of IT could be made by banks, one expert has said.
Financial services organisations could make more use of IT in order to help them comply with the vast number of regulations they must adhere to today.
This is the advice of PJ Di Giammarino, chief executive of think tank JWG-IT, who said at a recent industry event that 140,000 pages of regulation have been published in the past two years, Computer Weekly reports.
Before the credit crunch and then the recession, there would have been less than half of this volume, but organisations are now required to demonstrate they are accountable for their actions and that they can follow stringent rules.
Mr Giammarino said banks are being held back in their operations and could even be in danger of non-compliance with the law because IT solutions are not being brought in quickly enough at the beginning of the compliance process.
"There is so much going on that you cannot see the wood from the trees. People are expected to digest 100-page documents every day," he commented.
Mr Giammarino added: "There is little activity at a bank that does not depend on IT. IT has to be at the table during impact assessment [and] to be accountable across compliance projects."
Financial services analyst at Ovum Rik Turner said banks could be helped out by data management storage services.
Indeed, high volume scanning could prove to be particularly useful for compliance documents, as it would allow them to be retained where they are easy to access but not slowing down the work of the bank’s infrastructure.
It comes after Mike McConnell, former US director of national intelligence and now Booz Allen vice chairman, told Wall Street & Technology that banks need to think more carefully about the way they protect themselves against cyber attacks.
This may require employing data protection services from outside companies in order to protect sensitive information from theft, as hackers are employing ever more sophisticated measures to get their hands on what they want.