GMAC Commercial Mortgage, a financial services firm has reduced its Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs by 50%. The firm used an in-house automation solution centred on Microsoft technologies.

The Risk Management Compass (RMC) is designed to be scalable and handle Basel II and other regulatory regimes as well as SOX.

Features of the new system include

 *A framework for breaking down business processes into activities, associating risks to those activities, documenting the controls that mitigate the risks, and capturing evidence that the controls are in place
 *Support for monitoring several GMACCM risk categories, including credit, market, liquidity and operations
 *Visibility across business processes and at organizational levels, including real-time reporting and built-in workflows for exceptional resolution
 *Support for global collaboration by team members in different locations, including the capability for GMACCM business users to work together with the company's external auditors
 *Rapid and cost-effective implementation, including integration with other business systems

RMC was built on the .NET Framework. Other functionality technologies are Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003 -- the operating system foundation of Windows Server System(TM) integrated server software -- and Microsoft SQL Server(TM) 2000, which also is part of Windows Server System.

GMACCM's RMC solution is an excellent example of how financial institutions are fundamentally changing their operations experience by developing or acquiring solutions built on Microsoft technologies, said Bill Hartnett, managing director of the Financial Services Group at Microsoft. "The RMC solution comes at a time when the financial services industry is demanding solutions that reduce costs and ease the complexity of compliance, not just of SOX but of all the regulations put forth recently. Not only does RMC improve the operation's experience, it also helps reduce training costs and is easy to use from an employee standpoint. When financial institutions are dealing with complex regulations, ease of use is critical."

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