Boston, MA, November 9, 2009 – A new report from Aite Group, LLC explores the challenges of compliance officers as they keep up with the day-to-day and try to prepare for upcoming changes. In addition to summarizing the financial-industry failures that led to the current wave of regulatory reform, the report reviews relevant regulation proposals and examines the impact these will have on buy-side compliance officers. Finally, it provides a catalog of technology vendors and descriptors of the types of compliance systems and tools that are on the market.

This decade has been a painful one for the financial services industry as well as for asset managers, which are receiving more attention than usual from regulators. The industry is transforming under increasing regulation, and will be a very different environment in which to operate within a year's time. Regulators and clients will continue to expect more process control, reporting and transparency, while compliance officers - struggling to keep abreast of and meet the regulation requirements for current tasks - will continue to juggle priorities. While no comprehensive technology solution currently covers the full scope of their jobs, which entail numerous functions from trading and investing to operations, marketing and management, vendors are currently emphasizing workflow management support - perhaps the first step on the road to a comprehensive, interconnected compliance tool.

"Compliance officers' wish list includes more staff and automation and greater connectivity between technology systems," says Denise Valentine, senior analyst with Aite Group and author of this report. "Unfortunately, budgets dedicated to compliance departments are unlikely to grow dramatically unless regulatory action demands immediate implementation or vendors build solutions addressing the broad set of compliance responsibilities, which are automated, integrated and cost-effective. Until then, most officers will, by default, make do with what is at hand."

This 31-page Impact Report contains two tables. Clients of Aite Group's Institutional Securities & Investments service can download the report.