IT failing to cope with compliance demands

Current IT technology and services are failing to cope with increasingly stringent government and regulatory compliance requirements, research has claimed.

According to a survey of 60 UK financial services organisations in the UK, 39 per cent of respondents admitted that their current IT infrastructure is doing a poor job or needs improving to support regulatory requirements.

And nearly three in five financial services companies are introducing new systems to help meet compliance obligations.

Peter Stafford, IS director at Bank of Ireland in the UK, said in a statement: "Compliance with legal and regulatory frameworks is one of biggest challenges currently facing IT departments in the financial services industry."

But the survey, sponsored by IT services company Computacenter and Sun Microsystems, revealed that more than a quarter of organisations in the financial services industry are confident of being fully compliant.

Only two per cent of respondents admitted that they were uncertain of their ability to comply with the most important regulations, while 71 per cent said that projects were underway and that they would meet the deadlines.

Simon Gay, consultancy practice leader at Computacenter, said in a statement: "Compliance is not something you can achieve and then forget about. It is an ongoing process which requires a lot more than just ticks in the right boxes.

"These findings reveal that financial services companies are being over-optimistic about their ability to achieve compliance and the challenges that they will face in the future."

Gay insisted that, by combining compliance efforts with service improvement programmes, financial services companies can ensure that IT systems and processes, such as email archiving and disaster recovery, are also in line with the needs of the business.