Alacra Year In Review - Alacra Compliance

(Posted by Barry Graubart, Vice President, Product Management)

This year brought the introduction of four new products, the 4C’s, to Alacra.  Alacra Compliance was launched this spring.

Alacra Compliance is a workflow application that helps financial institutions comply with Patriot Act, Bank Secrecy Act and FSA regulations.  These “know-your-customer” initiatives, in support of anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing regulations, impact all aspects of customer relations.  From the initial on-boarding process to ongoing remediation of existing customers, financial institutions are required to investigate, analyze and monitor their customers to meet statutory requirements.

Alacra Compliance enables financial institutions to meet these requirements by applying a thorough and consistent global approach to KYC.  Alacra Compliance uses federated search to bring results from premium databases, the Alacra Compliance Web, a vertical search engine, and various public records databases including Secretary of State sites, stock exchanges, central banks and various government regulators.

During the past few months, we’ve added a number of new databases to Alacra Compliance, including watch lists from World-Check, news from Factiva and LexisNexis, public records data from Accurint, company data from OneSource, bigdough’s hedge fund database and more.  From web content, we can now return results from all Secretary of State and state insurance sites, thirty government regulators, watch lists such as OFAC SDN and the Bank of England sanction list plus dozens of stock exchanges and global companies’ houses and handelsregisters.

To support the user’s workflow, Alacra Compliance provides tools such as an Annotator, allowing researchers to capture their notes as they read through the various content.  The output of the process is the audit report, a date-stamped PDF containing all of the supporting documents used during the investigation.

In addition to the workflow application, we’ve also launched a Batch processing module, which allows rapid checking of large volumes of customer names against watch lists.  And, early in 2007, we’ll introduce the KYC Monitoring module, which provides ongoing monitoring for all of your customer accounts.

What’s most exciting about these applications is that all were developed working hand-in-hand with Alacra customers.  These early adopters have helped us shape the applications to meet their ongoing needs and the needs of the AML Compliance marketplace as a whole.  While it’s hard to tell what regulatory changes may come in the future, we know that by working closely with our customers, Alacra products will remain focused on real-world challenges.

This post is the second in the Alacra Year-in-Review series.