Cicada’s Profiler Solutions division is deploying components of its Profiler customer due diligence/KYC software to develop a case management tool for McDonald Information Service (MIS), provider of information on the reliability of retail and institutional accounts to more than 4000 financial institutions worldwide.
The tool, called MIS CM, will be provided as an ASP in the MIS data centre, and packaged into MIS’s services to provide automatic notification and case management facilities to customers of MIS’s due diligence and anti-money laundering products, as well as the company’s OFAC database services. MIS CM will process MIS daily reports, notify customers of their availability and provide a workflow tool for review and analysis. The product’s audit trail and reporting facilities will provide transparency and control.
MIS CM will replace the encrypted email system MIS currently uses to respond to its clients, according to Richard Rager, executive director at MIS. “Over the past year, a number of our clients have requested a case management tool for daily use, and to create an audit trail for provision to the regulators,” he says. “Cicada had been approaching financial institutions with its Profiler product, and contacted us saying many of its prospects had mentioned using our service, and suggesting that we work together to create a product that the industry would find valuable. They have provided us with a packaged version of the case management component of Profiler.”
Hubert Holmes, executive vice-president at Cicada, says to meet MIS’s requirement, it has separated out a case management tool from its larger Profiler product. “The tool takes in the MIS alerts automatically as a data feed, helps manage them and send them to the right person, creating an audit trail and recording the decisions made.”
MIS will shortly begin training its employees on the use of the system, and soon after that will begin beta testing. “Hopefully we will have the whole system live by the end of Q1,” says Rager. “All our clients will be using the service. Providing this in an ASP environment spreads the cost over the entire customer base.”
Alan Greenfield, vice president at MIS, says discussions are under way with Cicada about offering additional functionality. “We anticipate offering an ASP version of the entire Profiler solution to the trade,” he says, “and we are also considering adding technology and functionality that neither of us offers today, with a view to creating a universal one-stop-shop ASP solution. We want to enable our customers to use the case management tool not just for MIS alerts, but to manage all the data they are using, to make them more efficient in everything they do.”
Cicada is hoping to win some Profiler deals through exposure to the broker/dealers using MIS CM, as “a built-in customer base to which we can show the rest of Profiler as a potential solution to help better manage their other customer due diligence activities and document storage”, Holmes says. The vendor has not yet launched the case management component of Profiler as a separate product, but Holmes believes there would be a market for it. “We are also investigating the possibility of providing a broader Profiler ASP, aimed at tier two and three institutions,” he says, as well as “helping to integrate the management of other alerts into the system, such as those from AML transaction monitoring services.”
A Profiler ASP might be particularly attractive for clients seeking to address the client reclassification and repapering requirements of MiFID, Holmes says, “because reclassification is not an ongoing challenge – it’s a giant problem to solve right now, and then it becomes more of an operational issue”.
Cicada announced last year its intention to position its Profiler KYC system as a solution for MiFID (Reference Data Review, August 2006) and, says Holmes: “While we have been marketing and selling Profiler as a KYC solution, almost everyone we have spoken to in Europe has also asked us about reclassification and repapering of clients for MiFID.” Cicada also created a subsidiary, Profiler Solutions, headed by Holmes, to focus on compliance (Reference Data Review, September 2006).
Subscribe to our newsletter
