Banks to Test Open-Source RegQ

The platform provides an XML schema, which is based on the Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) document that CSI licensed from financial services consortium BITS' Financial Institution Shared Assessments Program, and a user interface (UI) to generate and accept SIGs.

The first firm will be deploying the platform behind its firewall to test system-to-system acceptance of SIGs, says Evan Bauer, CTO of CSI. Once running, the bank will use it to generate its own SIG documents that it will provide to its clients, as well as receive SIGs from one of their vendors, "with which it has dozens of contracts globally," he adds.

The second bank has decided to run RegQ on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis with the instance being hosted by a vendor partner from the Financial Institution Shared Assessments Program.

Bauer declines to estimate how long the second round of beta testing will last. "You never know how long it's going to last until they use it," he says.

The previous round of beta testing lasted approximately six weeks and involved participants using the platform on CSI servers using dummy non-confidential data.

The RegQ platform is a Web 2.0 application, which is built using a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack, according Bauer. "This is a Web services application that is more user-interactive intensive and will have the data volumes build up over time, but it's not a CPU-intensive operation," he adds, pointing out that one of the beta testers will be deploying on a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant server running Enterprise Red Hat Linux.

The current version of RegQ supports SIG version 3.1, which includes SIG Light that allows users to answer 54 questions to determine if they need to answer the remaining 2,000 SIG questions. When the Financial Institution Shared Assessments Program releases version 4.0, which it is currently developing, RegQ will support it, says Bauer.

Program partners have also shown interest in leveraging the RegQ platform for other industry questionnaire requirements, such as Basel II and Know Your Customer (KYC). "They're saying that those should be the next step," says Bauer, who expects these additions to appear as respective tabs in the UI.