Taoiseach to launch €5m technology centre in Cork

An Taoiseach Enda Kenny will today launch a €5 million technology centre in Cork designed to create new business opportunities for Irish financial services and technology companies through addressing governance and compliance issues.

The Governance, Risk and Compliance Technology Centre (GRCTC) is the latest addition to the network of 15 Technology centres in Ireland and will carry out R&D on semantic technologies which encode meanings separately from data and content files

The centre is hosted by University College Cork and funded by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation through Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland. Its aim is to address governance, risk management and compliance challenges for financial services companies.

According to a statement issued on behalf of the GRCTC, the new centre will develop semantic technologies with the potential to save financial organisations millions of euro and help them to comply with global regulations.

The GRCTC will also help to create jobs through the development and commercialisation of semantic technologies by small and medium sized Irish firms operating in the global marketplace.

The centre is in the process of putting together major R & D projects with several US-based financial institutions, with the semantic technologies being developed with some household names in the world of finance to be used by major financial institutions worldwide.

Companies actively involved with the GRCTC include AIB, TerraNua, Citi, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Wolters Kluwer, Linklaters, Propylon, Nathean Technologies, Compliance and Risks, Bank of Ireland, Iontas, Saticon, Abtran, BAE Detica, and SAP.

Explaining the need for the new centre, Peter Cowap, director of the GRCTC said the move towards “smart regulation” in financial services demands greater global harmonisation and a consistent approach to the production and interpretation of regulations.

“However, in this rapidly changing environment, governance, risk & compliance (GRC) departments in regulated financial services companies are struggling to keep up using increasingly outmoded manual and semi-automated approaches,” he said.

Gearoid Mooney, research and innovation manager at Enterprise Ireland welcomed today’s launch by the Taoiseach which takes place at the Glucksman Gallery in UCC and said the new centre will prove a major asset for Irish companies.

“Market-focused technology centres such as the Governance, Risk and Compliance Technology Centre are an effective model for ensuring that the application of State-funded research in Ireland is closely coupled to industry needs.

“Experience to date has established that it can deliver real results for the companies, the research community and ultimately accomplish the State’s objective of investing in the commercialisation of research in sectors of strategic and economic importance to Ireland.”

Head of international financial services at IDA Ireland Kieran Donaghue said the GRCTC will help positioning Ireland as a location to develop technologies that support more effective risk management and compliance within the financial services sector.

“The applied R&D undertaken here will help strengthen our value proposition for inward investment in areas that are now of critical importance to both the industry and regulators,” said Mr Donaghue.