MFT Governance: It’s in the Bank! December 11, 2009
Posted by Meg Sewell in News.Tags: banking industry, governance, Inovisworks, mandates, MFT, Security, SOX, Supply Chain Visibility, TARP, VAN
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Yesterday, an announcement was made that one of the world’s largest commercial banks has selected Inovis Managed File Transfer (MFT) software to manage their global file transfer services. To get the inside scoop on this client and banking trends, I spoke with John Thielens and Steve Brzezinski.
Here’s what they had to say on the issue of security and governance:
One of the key things about this bank’s situation is that it shows the increasing importance of governance in the MFT process. Not only was it costing them too much to operate their existing file transfer systems, but they also couldn’t get the visibility and insight needed to solve their compliance needs. These are the capabilities they decided to invest in to improve and get things to the next generation.
We believe MFT governance is getting mainstream and we’re seeing more examples like this. In this bank’s case, they were ready to refresh their file transfer software and invest in governance. But I think businesses will find that even recently installed solutions are ripe for some upgrading and replacement to bring more compliance capabilities.
As banks and insurers plan for 2010, we’re hearing some common things from their file transmission groups. First, many MFT systems are ready for a refresh as budgets start to free up post-recession. But, while projects have been in lock-down mode over the past two years, the compliance requirements have risen to a critical mass. And instead of just replicating existing processes, many file transmission groups are deciding to reinvent how they do file transfers with partners and corporate customers.
They’re baking in governance capabilities from the beginning, to better deal with mandates like TARP and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). And they’re investing in cloud-based capabilities to shorten the time to setup a new partner connection and get fee-based services flowing. This can be a huge gain, given it takes banks an average of 10-16 weeks to setup a fee-based trading partner. With a best-practice MFT system, onboarding times can be cut down to a week or less, which is a significant benefit given the $500 average fee collected from a commercial client.
