I am pleased to announce that Solix has signed an OEM agreement with Oracle Financial Services Software, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation, world’s largest enterprise software company. With this –

• Oracle Flexcube customers will be able to buy the Solix EDMS Archiving functionality from Oracle
• By selecting Solix from among the several current competitors, Oracle effectively endorses Solix as a technological leader in its field

This could not come at a better time for Oracle Flexcube customers, given the turmoil in the financial services industry. With budgets slashed and layoffs common, the challenge for their CIOs is to get the best value for the money left in the budget. Their priorites need to be:

• Doing more with less
• Ensuring compliance in the most cost-efficient manner

Solix EDMS helps meet both these goals by automatically managing archiving of data that is no longer in active use but which is required for compliance. This improves Oracle Flexcube performance while decreasing costs by moving older data to inexpensive, inactive media, which decreases storage costs while making the infrastructure more agile. By decreasing the amount of data that needs to be backed up and restored, it also improves DR system performance. It also can accelerate data migration when implementing or upgrading Oracle Flexcube. This is particularly important for multi-national banks that cannot afford long Flexcube down times when upgrading or recovering from an outage.

Solix EDMS can also have a positive impact on Basel II compliance. Published in June 2004, Basel II is intended to create international standards on which banking regulators can base reserve requirements for capital banks to help protect the international financial system from the impacts of the collapse of financial institutions. In practice Basel II imposes rigorous risk and capital management requirements designed to ensure that banks retain appropriate levels of capital reserves, based on the risk level of their lending and investment practices. In general, the greater the risk to the bank, the greater the reserve required to safeguard its solvency and overall economic stability. The final version aims at:

• Ensuring that capital allocation is more risk sensitive
• Separating operational risk from credit risk, and quantifying both
• Attempting to align economic and regulatory capital more closely to reduce the scope for regulatory arbitrage.

Compliance requires that banks upgrade their risk management processes, technology, and corporate guidance. Information Lifecycle management can make a positive impact on achieving those goals while decreasing overall IT capital and operational costs. For instance, Basel II requires that financial institutions apply an EU-formulated Risk Assessment Model at the end of each day of trading to demonstrate the institution’s solvency. If it fails that test, it must inform the authorities immediately and cease trading. By reducing the amount of data involved, Solix EDMS lifecycle management can streamline the analysis process, delivering the results faster at less cost.

Overall, this agreement is a four-way win: A win for Solix, because it is now allied with the world’s largest enterprise software company; a win for Oracle because it can now provide Information lifecycle management to its Flexcube users; a win for Flexcube users because this is the moment where they need this most. And most important, a win for existing Solix customers who now can be assured that Solix EDMS is a very advanced solution and endorsed by Oracle.