Cicada Cos. has added new functionality within its Reference Data Management Suite to help companies comply with the due diligence requirements of upcoming regulations including the U.K. Financial Services Authority’s ‘Know Your Customer’ framework and the U.S. Patriot Act. The company is also the first adopter of a recently upgraded version of sister company CouterpartyLink’s legal entity data feed, which among other things, helps with anti-money launder-ing regulation compliance (AML).
Cicada’s new capability, called Profiler, manages customer identification, account opening, review and verification.
The company feels regulatory complexities require an approach to managing customer data that goes beyond the creation of a centralized database alone. According to Hubert Holmes, executive vice president, Profiler’s focus is more on managing compliance requirements around customer data due diligence than on simply creating a consolidated repository.
Configurable rules provide built-in controls to assure that required customer record documentation has been attached and validated. The software enables a step-by-step approvals process. In addition, Cicada Profiler provides tools for AML risk-based customer profiling, which in turn helps automate the customer review and escalation process. The software also offers cross-referencing functionality and a document attachment facility for integrating customer record information.
Cicada Profiler has a fully configurable data model to enable storage and reference to all types of data required to provide a detailed analysis of customer records.
Cicada is also currently working on a legal entity data sourcing and custom-ized data management solution for a major bank. As part of that solution, it is using the recently upgraded version 1.2 of CounterpartyLink’s legal entity data feed.
The feed is designed to help organizations meet requirements of AML compliance, credit risk management, securities processing and client database/CRM applications.
Improvements in this version include more comprehensive and detailed listing, registration and regulator information and the inclusion of additional industry-standard identifiers.
CounterpartyLink data is collected in centres around the world. All data collection and intervention is supported by an audit trail to aid in meeting compliance requirements. Issuer and hierarchy data, as well as the related linkages needed to integrate with other data sources, are monitored continuously for corporate actions and other changes that affect the data.
The types of entities covered include corporations, funds and fund managers, financial institutions, governments, and most other common entities and their immediate, intermediate, and ultimate parents.
Data is available through a subscription-based license, driven by user-defined interest lists, and is delivered to customers on a daily basis, in a choice of file formats including XML and CSV (comma-delimited) files.
CounterpartyLink, which started up earlier this year (Reference Data Review, February 2005) is fully owned by the same owners of data management company Cicada.
