To Catch a Criminal

Mid-tier financial institutions may be interested in an anti-money-laundering and USA Patriot Act solution from Actimize, a New York-based surveillance-technology provider.

"At the beginning, anti-money laundering was a trend with big institutions because they didn't want to appear on the news," explains David Sosna, chief executive officer of Actimize. "Now, systems are becoming a commodity. You must have a compliance process and a transaction-monitoring system at all mid-size institutions as well."

The Actimize solution consists of pre-defined detection models, which Sosna says the vendor can customize for each client, augmenting the basic model with alternate-detection models. In addition, there is a case-management system to provide clients with alerts, investigation and reporting of suspicious behaviors.

Sosna asserts that Actimize's solution caters to the mid-tier market, which has traditionally had to gather internal data and create a new database for anti-money laundering and transaction monitoring. Actimize's solution, he says, will leverage existing data repositories within financial institutions, instead of building new data warehouses.

In addition, the vendor claims that implementation and on-site customization can be done within several weeks.

Sosna says that the solution is priced according to the amount of customers that an institution is servicing. - JP

212.643.4600, www.actimize.com