COCC RELEASES OUTSOURCED ANTI-MONEY LAUNDERING SERVICE

AVON, Conn., June 15, 2005 – COCC, a leading provider of next generation technology services for financial institutions, today released its outsourced anti-money laundering solution. The release follows a successful system pilot with Abacus Federal Savings Bank in New York City. COCC now offers the system to core and non-core processing clients alike. 

Jill Sung, President and CEO of Abacus Federal Savings Bank, said the anti-money laundering (AML) service is critical to her operation. “Any financial institution performing this process manually can’t possibly get the job done,” said Sung. “You need a high-powered technology solution to meet the constant challenge of discovering structured transactions.”

Abacus Federal processes cash and wire transactions which are considered “high risk” by regulatory agencies. “The COCC solution standardizes our approach to AML activity which is what the regulators are looking for,” said Sung.

COCC allied with a leading provider of anti-money laundering solutions (STB Systems, Inc.) to automate the complex tasks involved in complying with AML regulations. 170 STB clients use the company’s automated compliance solutions world wide.

“This is a top of the line system by any standard,” said Wendy DeMore, COCC’s First Vice President – Product Management. “We are pleased to have adapted it for core and non-core clients.”

DeMore explained that COCC’s AML solution, based on STB’s system, constructs a permanent compliance database from multiple transaction sources. As a rules-based solution, the STB system uses pre-set and client-specific “anomalies” to automatically alert the bank to patterns of exception activity and to identify potential money-laundering suspects.

“Our solution automatically generates information for Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) and Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) for review by bank officials,” said DeMore. “The system fully documents the alert, research, decision and filing of the suspicious activity reports.”

Worldwide money laundering activities are currently estimated to involve as much as $1.5 trillion dollars each year. With money center banks protected by sophisticated AML technologies, the illegal activity is striking more often at mid-sized financial institutions. “Unfortunately, this creates new concerns and operational challenges for community banks just as the regulatory burden is draining their resources,” said DeMore.

The aim of the COCC system is to hold the regulatory overhead to a minimum, according to DeMore. “This means providing a high quality, cost-effective outsourced AML solution implemented by experts who thoroughly train the client on site,” said DeMore.

While implementing the AML Solution, the bank trains on a fully functional test system equipped with pre-set “anomalies.” As the bank grows familiar with the system, customized anomalies to detect bank-specific situations can be defined and installed.  

“For example, the bank may elect to review all business customers who make deposits in even amounts of money, such as $2000,” said DeMore. “The bank may also want to be alerted to customers whose behavior deviates significantly from their peer group. The system is flexible enough to enable the bank to search for different activities at different times to keep the criminals off guard.”

In operation, the AML solution receives daily activity updates from the core accounting system. DeMore reports that COCC was able to streamline the update process at Abacus because the bank also uses COCC’s open core system. “Our open technology enabled us to accelerate the update process by as much as 30%,” said DeMore. “That really shows the value of open systems. However, our solution for banks using other core processors is highly robust as well.”

Sung adds that the bank is especially pleased with the system. “We like the system’s flexibility, its ability to automatically generate information for the Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), and to document activities supporting the SARs thereafter,” said Sung. “Nobody knows what the next round of examinations will require, but we believe that our current system will be able to adapt to additional requirements that come in the future.”