Cogent Economics has used its annual symposium, held recently at the Nikko Hotel in San Francisco, to sound a "clarion call" for enterprise-wide quality-control systems.Keynote speaker James Robinson discussed the three pillars of the Basel II capital adequacy II framework -- minimum capital requirements, the supervisory review process, and market discipline requirements -- as a mandate for enterprise QC rather than the relegation of QC to "a small department in the basement." Though the Basel Accords will primarily affect larger institutions, he said smaller banks and mortgage lenders will have incentives to adopt advanced approaches to risk assessment to pass regulatory muster and enjoy increased investor confidence in their loan originations. Symposium attendees also were briefed on plans to migrate the entire code base of CogentQC from FoxPro to C# (a language for Microsoft's .net platform) and to ease connectivity to SQL databases by the fourth quarter of this year. Cogent can be found online at http://www.cogentqc.com.
