I work for SAP, in the Banking area. Right now, Banks are having a real good time of it. They have to implement, in Europe, IAS accounting standards, and Basel II capital adequacy framework. One thing that I do now no for sure, that Bismark was right. "Those who like the law and sausages should not watch them being made."
Between IAS and Basel II, the IT implications are staggering. Before, banks kept all of the operational, transactional data in the operational systems, in the main processing OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) systems. Summaries would be posted out for accounting, and some management measurements, but that was about it. Then risk management came along in the end of the 1980's, and more data had to be taken out to do the statistical modelling. This was a bit more of a burden, as the data was at a lower level than the accounting summaries, and so Data Warehouses started to spring up, but often market by market.
Not any more. Stand by for Enterprise Level Transformation Excellence. (Actually that sounds like a cheap plastic toy that I saw recently in Akihabra, motorbike to rocketship and back kind of thing.) Basel II requires that all transactionally created balances and positions in the bank are collected, measured, and back-tested for up to seven years, or one economic cycle. IAS technically requires that all transactions in the bank are measured according to massively more detailed reporting criteria, that will require the capture, treatment, and retention of most transactions in the bank. So, now banks have to have live or near-live access to seven years data.
So, let's assume that a bank has 20 million transactions to manage a day, maybe a biggish retail bank. Also, we have the related positions and balances that are changed by these transactions, and some contract data (Your bank account terms, loan terms, etc.) And data on the 10 million customers of a large retail bank. Now, keep that for 7 years x 365 days. That's 7x365x40 or 102,200 million data records to be retained. And not just retained, but available somehow for stress and back testing, and also available to auditors, authorities, etc.
Bottom Line: legal people have not the faintest idea about the IT impact of laws. I personally have reason to be grateful for the changes, as these kind of legal road smashes generate a great deal of income for people like me. But who reviews these decisions in terms of real-world impact? SAP tries to sit in on these kind of committees, but I get the feeling that all it can do is prevent even worse disasters from happening.
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