FREE SOFTWARE UPGRADE REDUCES OFAC/ FINCEN WORK FOR CREDIT UNION CLIENTS

AVON, Conn., October 31, 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 eight hours to five minutes,” said Sherri Vallie, ATM Manager at $1.46B HarborOne Credit Union in Brockton, MA. “Previously, when the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) updated its list, we would have to review 600 pages of potential entries. Most of those entries were false positives. The upgrade’s advanced logic eliminated the false positives, giving us far fewer entries and saving us a tremendous amount of time.”

Ms. Vallie added that the new process reduces the chance of error as well as the time needed to get the work done. “We now have a completely manageable process,” she said.

Next generation technology enabled COCC to respond quickly when the Department of Homeland Security 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 member” 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 member 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 member data because “you can see it,” Ms. Vallie added. “If you have two or three possibilities, the information is all there. I can even add notes to the listings to document the credit union’s decision-making process.”