Chase Cooper, the City-based operational risk and compliance specialists will sponsor this year's award for the "Innovative use of technology in operational risk and compliance" at the 2006 Operational Risk & Compliance Magazine Achievement Awards Ceremony.  Applications to compete for the award are open to any firm world-wide, and will be judged by a prestigious panel of operational risk and compliance experts. Winner's awards will be made at the Achievement Awards Dinner on April 6th 2006.

Operational Risk and Compliance Magazine created the Awards to recognise excellence among individuals and firms implementing operational risk frameworks and techniques. The 2006 Ceremony will be the third one to be held, and over 2000 senior executives from firms around the world have been individually invited to enter their programmes for this prestigious Event.

There are sixteen different achievement awards in all, reflecting the wide scope now covered by operational risk and compliance disciplines.  Thirteen of these will be judged by the panel of experts, but three of them (Operational Risk Executive of the Year,  Compliance Executive of the Year  and Regulator of the Year) will be voted on by the operational risk community in early March.

John Kiddy from Chase Cooper remarked "I was particularly keen to sponsor this year's technology award because it highlights in a very significant way the increasing importance of IT in supporting the disciplines of operational risk and compliance. Many of the early IT operational risk initiatives only went a small part of the way towards providing effective technology support for operational risk and compliance, but now, thanks to publicity initiatives such as those undertaken by Op Risk Magazine, many financial sector firms are now looking at extending their operational risk assessment and control platforms to include enhanced applications for areas such as "risk indicators and losses" and for the modelling of control failures.

Chase Cooper provides consulting, technology and business support services to help companies with Basel II compliance and operational risk.  Chase Cooper has an international customer base to which it provides operational risk and compliance consulting services and has developed Accelerate, a purpose-built, comprehensive suite of operational risk software to meet the Basel II regulatory requirements of financial institutions globally.