AVON, Conn. — A Web-delivered free upgrade to its core processing system has sharply reduced the work involved with meeting stringent new Department of Homeland Security reporting requirements, COCC says.
The Connecticut-based provider of technology solutions says it began installing the upgrade this summer and now has it in place at 72% of its client base of 152 financial institutions, which includes 35 credit unions.
The software upgrade reduces the labor involved with OFAC and FinCEN reporting by more than 90%, COCC says. A key client of the client-owned core processor agrees.
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"The upgrade reduced our review process from eight hours to five minutes," says Sherri Vallie, ATM manager at $1.5 billion HarborOne Credit Union in Brockton, Mass. "We now have a completely manageable process."
The upgrade was a result of COCC's deployment of compliance software from ATTUS Technologies of Charlotte, N.C., in an outsourced solution that COCC says automates many OFAC and FinCEN reporting tasks and was adopted when Homeland Security first began the requirements.
Wendy DeMore, first vice president of product management at COCC, says the combined COCC/ATTUS solution made reviewing names on OFAC/FinCEN lists much easier than it would be on older legacy mainframe systems, and that the upgrade this summer further reduced the time needed by another 90%.
The upgrade uses a sophisticated name-matching algorithm to create a "good member" list that removes "good names" from future reports, thus lessening the size of lists for subsequent screening, COCC says.
"Our clients were looking for more precise matches when checking the OFAC list against their member data," DeMore says. "The ATTUS engineering team took it one step further by delivering it over the Web."
She says Web delivery of lists of potential matches makes data easier to work with because "you can see it. 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."
Vallie at HarborOne says she can see the difference.
"Previously, when the Office of Foreign Asset Control updated its list, we would have to review 600 pages of potential entries," she says.
"Most of those entries were false positives," she says. "The upgrade's advanced logic has eliminated the false positives, giving us far fewer entries and saving us a tremendous amount of time."
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