FREE SOFTWARE UPGRADE REDUCES OFAC/ FINCEN WORK FOR COMMUNITY BANK CLIENTS

AVON, Conn., October 30, 2007 – COCC, the region’s leading provider of next generation technology services for financial institutions, today announced that a free software upgrade has reduced the labor associated with OFAC and FinCEN reporting by more than 90%. The upgrade has been installed at 72% of COCC’s core processing clients.  

“The upgrade reduced our review process from 45 minutes to one,” said Donna Funaro, Assistant Vice President at Litchfield Bancorp in Litchfield, CT. “We used to review pages and pages of entries every time the OFAC list changed, yet most of those entries were false positives. The upgrade eliminated the false positives, giving us far fewer entries and saving us a tremendous amount of time.”

Linda Carmichael, Vice President at Family Federal in Fitchburg, MA, sees similar results from the COCC solution. The bank recently switched its OFAC/FinCEN reporting solution from one that required the raw data to be “massaged” in Excel before it could be entered into the reporting system.

“The new process reduces the chance of error as well as the time needed to get the work done,” said Ms. Carmichael. “I have reduced costs significantly as a result of the COCC upgrade.”

Next generation technology enabled COCC to respond quickly when federal banking agencies first required financial institutions to check OFAC and FinCEN lists for possible matches. COCC combined its customer-centered core processing platform with the leading compliance software by ATTUS Technologies to offer a unique outsourced solution that automates many OFAC and FinCEN reporting tasks. Reviewing names on the OFAC/FinCEN lists is much easier on COCC’s system than the older style, legacy mainframe systems used by most financial institutions today.

This summer, COCC introduced a free upgrade to the outsourced solution that further reduces a financial institution’s reporting tasks by 90%. The productivity gains come as a result of advanced name searching and a “good customer” list which enables a financial institution to remove “good” names from future reports and reduces the OFAC matching task to a far more manageable size.

Wendy DeMore, First Vice President – Product Management at COCC, explained that the software upgrade utilizes the most sophisticated name matching algorithm available “because our clients were looking for more precise matches when checking the OFAC list against their customer data,” she said.  “The ATTUS engineering team took it one step further by delivering via the web.”

Web delivery of the list of potential matches makes it easier to work with customer data because “you can see it,” Ms. Funaro added. “If you have two or three possibilities, the information is all there. I can even add notes to the listings to document the bank’s decision-making process. We really like this, and so did the FDIC.”