FSCS compliance – action required now to meet 31st December 2010 deadline

Application Data Migration solution removes complexity, reduces cost and minimises risk for easier compliance with legislation-driven initiative

London, UK, 24 February, 2010 – Celona, the leading provider of Application Data Migration software, has moved swiftly in response to the complex issue of Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) compliance.

UK deposit takers will be required to provide the FSCS with a Single Customer View (SCV) file, providing details of a customer’s aggregate deposits and the amount of compensation due, within 72 hours of the request being made. However, the process of producing an SCV file for submission to the FSCS is proving an expensive and complex task. Ernst & Young, for example, highlight the significant financial impact, estimating that the core cost of the SCV could be between £431 and £539 million. For the largest banks in the sector, this equates to a multi-million pound project.

“The next few months are critical for financial institutions as they race to comply before 31st December 2010. This is a highly complex and expensive process, especially for larger banks due to the number of portfolio products across their customer base – but all financial institutions will face difficulties in ensuring their systems are FSCS compliant, on top of the usual daily business demands,” said Charles Andrews, CEO, Celona. “What is at first sight a fairly simple requirement for the business is a sizeable problem for the IT function due to the large amounts of data migration involved.”

The Celona FSCS solution delivers a low-risk, fully compliant migration solution, along with a business-level audit trail and production of the SCV data to meet the FSCS deadline. Using a new generation application data migration platform, Evolve from Celona, the solution is specifically designed to de-risk the data migration process by understanding the context by which data is being used in the organisation, and to preserve that context throughout the migration process. One significant advantage for users is the ability for Evolve to migrate data while concurrently synchronising it between legacy and new application systems with minimal risk and without business disruption.

The Celona Evolve platform for Financial Services has been specifically designed for the financial industry focusing on providing business agility never previously possible with traditional migration tools and methods. Celona Evolve is able to handle all data migration activities, delivering:

Significantly reduced risk – taking data migration off the critical path
Zero downtime – nothing goes off-line
Earlier results in the migration cycle
Business audit trail demonstrating compliance
Lower cost of compliance and migration
Faster implementation of new systems
Ease of maintenance
Re-usable for future data migration projects.

Further details of how to overcome the issues of FSCS compliance can be found in a new Celona white paper available at http://www.celona.com/data-migration-solutions/industries/financial-serv... .