An acquisition and a string of upgrades and enhancements to existing products indicate that compliance is anything but last year’s news.

SunGard, kicking off the new year with (surprise) an acquisition, is folding Massachusetts-based compliance and surveillance solutions vendor Protegent into its SunGard Online Investment Systems business. Protegent's BrokerAudit analyzes the quality of supervision and practice and responds on an ongoing basis to both regulatory and legislative challenges. Built on Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000, Protegent’s BrokerAudit is available as a product or as a hosted service. In announcing the acquisition, Paul Erickson, president of the expert solutions unit of SunGard Online Investment Systems, specifically noted that it would help customers better address “perpetually-changing compliance requirements.” The product will join the Synapse product suite and will complement Synapse Surveillance, which is used by compliance officers and field supervisors to monitor transactions and employee activity across an enterprise.

BrokerAudit itself has continued to keep changing compliance needs front and center. The 3.3 release includes new features to address the regulatory environment. And, noting the SECs recent interest in fee-based accounts and their suitability as buy and hold investment accounts, Protegent has distributed exception reporting on fee based accounts for all levels of investment firms management for over two years.

When Microsoft partner Eagle Investment Systems released version 6.0 of its products last year its Eagle Reference Manager was enhanced with an extended data model to support the Securities and Exchange Commission’s anti-money laundering requirements.

Meanwhile, another Microsoft partner DST Systems, together with Boston Financial Data Services released a program for mutual fund compliance called Compliance+. Chief compliance officers (CCOs) of all US mutual fund companies were expected to have policies and procedures in place by October 5 of last year to comply with Rule 38a-1 of the Investment Company Act of 1940, which requires investment companies to implement written procedures for compliance with certain federal securities laws, review them annually and designate a CCO. Compliance+ consists of documentation rather than an automated solution right now, according to a DST spokesperson, but it identifies federal statutes that are generally applicable to mutual fund transfer agents and maps them to business processes and workflows such as anti-money laundering programs and transaction processing. It also provides a “measurement dashboard” to connect the business processes to key compliance measures.

And for Charles River Development, whose compliance product dates back to the founding of the company in 1984, modifications to the system within the past year have increased scalability, taken advantage of Web services, and made the user interface simpler to manage, said Tonda Bourque compliance product manager.

“From a business perspective, with the SEC coming down on everyone,including recently the rule of putting in place a CCO, clients are looking at more that just regulations but internal rules and SEC mandates,” Bourque said. “We have been making great strides in making it as user-friendly as possible. We always had a rule builder but we have been taking suggestions from clients in terms of making it more intuitive. You don’t need to know a programming language to create a new rule,” she said.

Web services have increased the ability to view and run reports from a remote location. Other enhancements down the road may include responding to alerts via the Web or handheld devices.