SunGard: The Top 10 Trends in Wealth Management Risk and Regulation

Today, SunGard issued a press release examining 10 risk management and regulation-related trends affecting the wealth management industry. While providing few specific solutions to address these issues, the findings offer a worthwhile look at what major trends vendors like SunGard are seeing in the market.

Without further ado, and stealing from Late Night with David Letterman, here are the Top 10 trends in the wealth management space, according to SunGard:

1. Compliance officers must constantly educate themselves and respond quickly to new and changing regulations.

2. Post-Madoff, revised custody rules require bank, trust and brokerage organizations to clearly identify and manage the impact of counterparty risk.

3. Wealth managers must quickly reassess readiness and address gaps within compliance and risk programs, business processes and IT infrastructures to prepare for widespread reform.

4. Firms must improve efficiencies and address gaps in order to fully focus on strategic, client-facing activities to improve client retention and satisfaction.

5. Experts with financial services and technology domain knowledge are highly valued for analyzing business practices, platforms, and third-party arrangements.

6. Effective management of enterprise data sources, standardization, reporting and real-time information is critical to compliance.

7. Many organizations are hiring consulting resources or revamping their internal staff to achieve an ideal level of compliance within required timelines.

8. Compliance with financial reform and risk management initiatives will continue to require significant investment, but this should result in more efficient processing, analytics and technology infrastructures for financial organizations.

9. Addressing compliance requirements—from gathering enterprise-wide information, on-demand data and real-time analytics—should help firms respond to queries from multiple stakeholders and clients.

10. Firms are actively leveraging existing investments in technology and processes to cover multiple aspects of risk management and compliance, such as adapting Anti-Money Laundering solutions to monitor for fraud.