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Innovative Systems Hosted Service
Selected for OFAC Compliance |
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Financial services arm of international automotive manufacturer selects
Innovative Systems as its compliance hosted services provider |
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| Pittsburgh, PA - June 23, 2004 - Innovative Systems, Inc., a global provider of customer data integration and regulatory compliance solutions, today announced that the financial services affiliate of a major international automotive manufacturer has selected Innovative's i/Lytics SECURE™ Hosted Service for screening its customers against the U.S. Treasury's OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) list, as mandated by several regulatory and legislative laws, including the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act. The hosted service significantly reduces compliance budgets by eliminating the time and cost associated with implementing and maintaining interdiction software systems. Additionally, the service allows organizations to confidently off-load the complex task of managing the stream of regular updates to the expanding OFAC list. |
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| The i/Lytics SECURE Hosted Service model delivers unparalleled power and flexibility to organizations aiming to achieve highly reliable screening and matching results without incurring the technology and personnel infrastructure associated with comprehensive compliance programs. The financial services client will use the hosted service to compare its customer database and transactions against the U.S. Treasury's OFAC Specially Designated Nationals list (SDN) of suspect individuals, foreign countries, terrorism-sponsoring groups and international narcotics traffickers. As Treasury adds new entries to the OFAC SDN list, the hosted compliance service will automatically incorporate these new entries to its comparison list. Additionally, the client's database of approximately 5 million customer records will be compared against these new OFAC entries to ensure that previously safe customers are not now considered suspect. There were over 30 updates to the OFAC SDN list in 2003, and there have been more than a dozen updates so far in 2004. |
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| "Interdiction software, either licensed or developed internally, to assist organizations with their OFAC compliance efforts has been the norm," said Richard DeLotto, Principal Analyst, Research with Gartner. "But for cost-conscious organizations looking for new ways to reduce their compliance costs without sacrificing results, the hosted services model provides some attractive benefits. In particular, the hosted model allows organizations to outsource the critical and time consuming task of monitoring the updates made to the various compliance lists such as OFAC, and incorporating these updates into their operational comparison lists in a timely manner. However, organizations must perform effective due-diligence to ensure that their hosted services provider delivers the necessary high levels of accuracy and reliability in their matching and update processes." |
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| The i/Lytics SECURE Hosted Service employs Innovative's powerful data cleansing, data matching, database management and suspect screening capabilities to provide a comprehensive compliance solution that offers unmatched accuracy and efficiency. The solution includes screening capabilities for a host of compliance lists, such as OFAC, FBI Most Wanted, Bank of England, state and federal Do-Not-Call, and others. It also combines heuristic and referential matching to verify customer identities, per the Customer Identification Program (CIP) requirements of the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act and Bank Secrecy Act aimed at identifying and preventing money laundering, fraud and identify theft. Innovative's CIP processing capability compares customer records against a database of more than 20 billion U.S. consumer and business records. This proprietary database is updated daily and provides accurate and detailed historical and forward-looking customer contact information. |
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| According to Jeff Canter, Innovative's executive vice president of global marketing and operations, "Innovative is aggressively embracing the hosted services model as an important alternative for delivering industry leading compliance and data quality solutions to the marketplace. Historically, best practices in these areas have been reserved to large organizations with the resources to support the infrastructure investment of licensing software. The hosted model tears down these infrastructure barriers for smaller organizations looking to solve the same data quality and compliance issues, but with fewer resources. We see hosted services as the wave of the future, and this new financial services client demonstrates that there are benefits to be gained with this model for large and small organizations alike." |
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| Innovative's compliance service is a hybrid of hosted batch processing and remote client access for suspect review, investigation, and ad-hoc searches. Once the client's customer database has been cleansed and loaded into the hosted system, it is compared against the compliance list. Then Innovative's subject matter experts develop a 'baseline' from which to compare all future customer transactions, adds and changes. These future transactions and customer records are provided to the hosted service via a secure portal connection. Suspect records are made available to the client for investigation through a web-based review and case management tool. If determined that the record is not a match, the client can add the reviewed customer record to its proprietary 'safe list' so that it will not be flagged for future investigation. Likewise, records that are determined to match the compliance list can easily be marked for disposition and reporting. |
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| For additional information on Innovative's compliance solutions, contact Debbie Nahm of Innovative Systems at 800-622-6390 ext. 7657. |
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| About Innovative Systems, Inc. |
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| Innovative Systems is a world leader in delivering enterprise customer information solutions to organizations whose success depends on a complete and accurate understanding of their customers. ISI's solutions include: i/Lytics® Enterprise Data Quality Suite; i/Lytics GLOBAL™ Suite for CASS™ certification, geocoding, and longitude/latitude coordinates; Synchronos™, ISI’s proven CDI and enterprise customer management solution; and FinScan™ for compliance list, sanctions and PEP screening compliance. |
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| Since 1968, companies worldwide have relied on ISI’s data quality software, systems integration, database solutions and customer data quality audits. The company has set the standard for data quality management in thousands of customer-centric projects utilizing the firm’s services for creation and maintenance of customer data. ISI’s work has included clients in more than 30 countries. ISI maintains headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with European operations based in London. Representative offices are in Washington, D.C., Phoenix, AZ, and Mexico City. The Innovative Web site is located at www.innovativesystems.com.
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| Company Press Contact: |
Karin O'Sullivan
Innovative Systems, Inc.
Tel: +1 (412) 937 7678
kosullivan@innovativesystems.com |
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Trademark Notice
i/Lytics, i/Lytics Data Profiler, i/Lytics SECURE, eWatchLine, FinScan and Synchronos are trademarks of Innovative Systems, Inc. All other products or company names are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners. |
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