Largest Operational Risk Management System implementation now live at SEB with Optial

London, England, 6 July 2006 - Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB), the
major Scandinavian international banking group, has gone live with Optial to support the Bank’s global Operational Risk Management processes. SEB has deployed the Optial system with a broad functional scope that includes loss database, operational risk self-assessments, key risk indicators, internal control monitoring and policy distribution. Approximately 20,000 SEB staff are using the system across 20 countries in SEB’s global enterprise, taking advantage of Optial’s multi-language facility to use the system in Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian and German as well as Swedish and English.

Philip Winckle, Head of Group Risk Control at SEB said, “Optial has more than delivered on the expectations we had when we selected them from a very long list of alternative suppliers. We have achieved with Optial the transparency we sought in Operational Risk that the Bank already have in the management of Credit and Trading risk. We can now deliver to the Board of the Bank a clear understanding of SEB’s Operational Risk position; together with details of the mitigation processes and control infrastructure that has been built to address these risks. Using Optial’s operational risk management software, SEB are now able to demonstrate clearly to the supervisor that the Bank are successfully meeting the criteria for Basel II AMA recognition”.

Lars Hansén, Head of Operational Risk at SEB, agreed, adding, “It was vital to us that we chose a scaleable system that was also flexible enough to match the deep functionality the bank needed to fully reflect our own methodologies across the different divisions and operating units. Optial has met all our expectations through their approach, flexibility, functional richness and "bank-side" assistance with the implementation to ensure that the project was a resounding success; delivered on schedule and budget so that SEB capture every significant incident and loss event at source. Optial’s easy data entry and strong workflow engine has helped us to achieve the change management required throughout the bank to ensure that a system of this size and scope has been quickly implemented. These facets of Optial have also helped us to achieve an ongoing cultural shift to embed recognition of operational risk and associated control processes into the daily work routines of our staff around the world. It is equally important that we, as a management team, can clearly see and understand the Bank’s operational risks and what is being done to mitigate and address them. Optial has delivered in all these areas and has proven conclusively, that they have the right technology and expertise that helped SEB to achieve our ambitious objectives in this large scale global implementation”.

Chris O’Brien, CEO of Optial, said, “We have been very pleased to work with SEB, to deliver on schedule and budget, what we believe to be the largest implementation of an advanced operational risk management system worldwide. There were a number of key success factors in the project including: strong Bank senior executive support from the start, positioning of the project as part of the overall “One-SEB” initiative, strong project management and structured involvement of all divisions of the Bank, both in the Head Office and operating units around the world. It was good to see the early involvement of technical staff at key points, and above all the strong commitment and focus of all project members to succeed. Ultimately a prime success factor was that the flexible Optial platform was able to meet the bank’s diverse requirements and beyond, providing the capability to adapt to changing regulatory and operating conditions with the minimum of effort in the future.”