Press Releases

Ziegler Uses SunGard’s Protegent for Firm-Wide Compliance and Surveillance

March 9, 2009 — Salt Lake City, UT

Ziegler Wealth Management (symbol: ZGCO), a full service regional broker-dealer based in Chicago, is using SunGard’s Protegent Surveillance for company-wide compliance, surveillance and regulatory processing.  A comprehensive compliance and surveillance solution for financial services institutions, Protegent Surveillance provides trade and account-based compliance reviews that give firms an enterprise-wide view of compliance performance and helps enhance firms’ ability to quickly assess risk.  Ziegler Wealth Management rolled out Protegent Surveillance to approximately 100 of its financial advisors, regional sales supervisors and branch managers in an application service provider (ASP) environment within an eight-week timeframe.  

Developing, acquiring and maintaining the appropriate tools for compliance and regulatory oversight can be difficult for many small- to medium-sized broker-dealers to achieve in a cost-effective and efficient manner. As a full service firm with a multi-product business model and complicated branch network, Ziegler Wealth Management required a flexible range of trade blotters, rules and alerting capabilities to accommodate its hierarchical structure, without significant modification. Protegent Surveillance provided this, and helps Ziegler Wealth Management to control internal and regulatory risk by proactively pinpointing questionable transactions and positions, improving field supervision processes, and keeping pace with regulatory changes.

Mike McLaughlin, chief administrative officer at Ziegler Wealth Management, said, “We needed a tool that could accommodate our hierarchical structure and grow with us as our needs change. SunGard’s Protegent Surveillance is a comprehensive solution that can be used effectively by branch managers, supervisors and advisors, and provides a holistic view of activity and risk across our Wealth Management division. Protegent helps keep us up to date on the latest rules and regulations and automatically incorporates them into the software.”

“Today’s smaller firms need to have access to proven compliance and supervisory tools to help them assess risk quickly, increase productivity, and keep up with the regulatory landscape,” said Steve Sabin, chief operating officer of SunGard’s Protegent business unit.  “As an ASP-based solution, Protegent helps both large and small firms obtain the compliance tools and reliability they need without the long implementation timelines and resource overhead.”

SunGard provides a diverse set of compliance and risk mitigation solutions that encompass risk management, surveillance, supervision, regulatory and ethics monitoring.  Leveraging SunGard’s Common Services Architecture*, compliance components can be rapidly deployed alongside or embedded within line-of-business systems and orchestrated to provide an enterprise-wide view. SunGard also provides regulatory and compliance consulting services that are designed to help senior executives at financial institutions assess the quality and substance of their risk and compliance programs.

* SunGard Financial Systems is pursuing a visionary initiative to transform some of the key functionality of its core systems into components to form a new software development and on-demand delivery environment called Infinity. Infinity helps enable financial institutions to develop and deploy custom applications, integrating SunGard components with their own proprietary or third party components. Infinity uses SunGard's Common Services Architecture (CSA), a service-oriented architecture (SOA) development framework, offering business process management (BPM) and a virtualized, software-as-a-service (SaaS) infrastructure.

About Ziegler
The Ziegler Companies, Inc. (symbol: ZGCO) is a growth-oriented boutique investment banking and investment services firm with a primary focus in the healthcare, senior living, religion, school and renewable energy sectors. Operations encompass capital markets (capital advisory services, bond underwriting, mortgage banking, institutional sales and trading) and wealth management, including asset management and investment services. For more information, visit www.ziegler.com.

About SunGard’s Protegent
SunGard’s Protegent solutions for compliance, suitability and new account opening help retail and institutional investment firms oversee business processes relating to client acquisition and suitability, including Know Your Customer and OFAC list checking, as well as employees’ personal trading and code of ethics, while helping reduce expenses and address regulatory requirements.  Protegent supports supervision and practice, helps streamline the compliance life cycle, proactively monitors trades and provides comprehensive auditing and reporting.

About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies.  SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries, including the world’s 25 largest financial services companies.

SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector.   SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.

With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 472 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented five times.  For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com.

*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com

Trademark Information:  SunGard, the SunGard logo and Protegent are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries.  All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.