An enlightening podcast discussion on what effect the regulation of the financial services industry will have was released yesterday by Finextra, featuring a discussion between Michael Dawson of Promontory, (an ex-regulator himself) and Keith Saxton, Global Director of Financial Markets of IBM.

Here are some of the highlights and our conclusions on them:

• Management information systems available to regulators and firms are not robust enough to cope with increased demands. It’s still too hard to measure risk horizontally and technology is being looked at now to help cope with this
• There was a clear identification of regulators as opportunities – especially a potential “uber-regulator” – maybe the IMF, to look at systematic risk across financial markets
• The commentators said that there was a significant data issue – that FS companies needed to build effective models of liquidity risk, and technology was urgently needed to help solve this issue
• The desire for greater transparency is becoming more real, there’s more commitment to it. First stop will be governments opening up their “national darlings” to regulators. There was a view that only technology could help FS companies manage the huge number of compliance obligations in the future.
• Regulators are keeping a sharp eye out for banks “going too fast, taking on too much risk, banks who might need to slow down” – the banks that do well out of the turmoil will need the systems and processes in place to prove that they can chew what they bite off.

Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media made a speech yesterday on the theme “Why ICT research is even more important in the aftermath of the financial crisis.”

She made some interesting points about the amount of investment the EU is making (more than 2bn euro in 18 months), the areas where they want to encourage European growth (software and services, especially in the cloud). Some of the interesting parts of the article and what she had to say are below: 

“The ICT sector provides the heartbeat of the real economy, of our productivity growth, of our capacity to innovate and create jobs and of our ability to address key societal challenges.

What is on the agenda at ICT 2008? We will unveil details of the EU-funding for the next wave of ICT projects – more than € 2 billion of EU funding over the next 18 months.

If Europe wants for example, to lead the transition to a low-carbon, knowledge economy we can only do this with a massive and targeted development and take-up of innovative ICT solutions.

• In telecoms, European equipment manufacturers are leaders in broadband data networks and mobile devices.
• Europe is also a leading worldwide player in the design, integration and supply of embedded systems.
• Europe has secured 30-35% of the market for ICT systems embedded in products in domains like automotive, industrial automation and avionics.
• Europe is also a leading player in the semiconductor industry. Here European programmes have helped us build and keep these positions as the recent funding decisions by the embedded systems and nano-electronic Joint Technology Initiatives demonstrate.
• Europe also has leaders in enterprise software, equipping many of the world’s major companies and SMEs. World leading research on software technologies is also taking place in our public labs. We need to build on this and expand further our presence in software and services including in important areas such as web-based services 

The second principle is that we should be well placed to seize the opportunities of future markets. Let me highlight two such markets: The Future Internet and ICT for Energy Efficiency

Our investments in research and the opening up of the new markets will not be fully exploited unless we can make Europe a much better place to establish high-tech start-ups. Today, few European SMEs break through the ceiling of € 20 million turnover. Why is it that so few European ICT start-ups have come through to become global players?”

The whole article is available from Public Technology