No institution presently has the capacity and mandate to gather comprehensive data, and to conduct the applied research needed to safeguard the financial system against systemic risk. Managing systemic risk in a timely and comprehensive manner is a different challenge from those regulators have addressed in the past. Meeting this challenge will require novel interdisciplinary collaboration among experts in statistics, applied mathematics, operations research, network analysis and computer science, as well as financial economics. The data and analytic needs will be significant and the NIF will take advantage of economies of scale in staffing and computing resources in ways that our individual, focused regulators cannot.