UC4 Software

Automated scheduling of Avaloq Banking System (ABS) and enterprise systems with UC4 Workload Automation SuiteVIENNA, February 3, 2009 – UC4 Software, a leading global provider of workload automation, job scheduling and IT process optimization solutions, today announced the certification of UC4 Workload Automation Suite for use with the Avaloq Banking System (ABS) version 2.6. The companies have also signed a partnership agreement that will enhance Avaloq to refer customers requiring a complementary scheduling and automation solution to UC4 Software.“The certification of the UC4 adapter enables organisations to utilise a complementary technology that has been successfully tested and validated against our Model Bank environment,” said Adrian Bult, COO, Avaloq Evolution AG. “Joint customers will be able to increase the return on their existing technology investments leveraging a solution that interfaces directly with the Avaloq Banking System.”Avaloq solutions are changing the IT landscapes within private and retail banks in Switzerland, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Singapore, Hong Kong and other markets. With UC4 Workload Automation Suite enterprises remove manual intervention, reduce latency and mitigate risk from their end-to-end business processes. The UC4 Business Integration for Avaloq communicates directly with ABS through application interfaces, allowing customers to extend the automated scheduling of their core banking systems and integrate with external applications.UC4 Workload Automation Suite can manage back-end processing for ABS and all other surrounding systems that many finance institutes rely on. Avaloq users receive regular software updates which support banks in remaining compliant with industry regulations. When utilizing additional tools it is important that Avaloq users work with solutions that are compatible and certified for use with Avaloq. This reduces maintenance and support issues and allows joint customers to benefit from the enterprise wide visibility and control provided by UC4.“It gives UC4 great pleasure to extend its relationship with Avaloq,” said Cesare Capobianco, chief executive officer, UC4 Software. “We have benefited from an excellent working partnership working towards receiving this certification. It has allowed us to develop an interface that is compliant with Avaloq’s technical specifications, which also delivers measurable business value to our joint customers.”About AvaloqThe Avaloq Group, with branches in Luxembourg and Singapore, is the Swiss market leader in the field of standard banking software. For over a decade, the Swiss company has been developing and marketing the Avaloq Banking System. It is trusted by leading financial service providers in private, retail and universal banking in international financial centres around the globe. A network of specialists with first-class partners in the areas of implementation, software, service and technology enables Avaloq to offer its clients a comprehensive all-in-one solution – a modular, innovative and integrated standard software for the financial sector. Avaloq is owned by its management and employees.About UC4 SoftwareUC4 Software is a leading global provider of workload automation, job scheduling and IT process optimization solutions that ensure core business processes and enterprise information systems run faster, more accurately and without interruption. More than 1,600 companies worldwide have successfully enhanced application processing performance and improved IT efficiency using UC4’s business acceleration solutions. Customers include American Suzuki Motor Corporation, Cadbury, eBay, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, Mattel, McGraw Hill, Panasonic, Robert Bosch, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, T-Systems and Verizon

Vallstein

Vallstein is leidend op het gebied van Bank Relationship Management (BRM) oplossingen. Vallstein is opgericht in 2000 met als visie een doorbraak te creëren in de manier waarop organisaties omgaan met één van de basis componenten van hun bedrijfsvoering, de bankrelaties. Hoeksteen van de Vallstein oplossingen, is de WalletSizing^® methodologie, die een fundamentele vernieuwing brengt binnen BRM. Toegankelijk gemaakt via ASP (Application Service Provider), stelt het middelgrote en grote organisaties in staat om volledig inzicht te verkrijgen, controle te hebben over en compliant te zijn met hun bank gerelateerde activiteiten. Het resultaat is een informatievoorsprong en significant betere condities. Al meer dan 130 bedrijven gebruiken Vallstein’s oplossingen om invulling te geven aan BRM.

Vallstein biedt haar software oplossing aan in 2 varianten:

WalletSizing^® Business Edition waarbij u het merendeel van de analyse en werkzaamheden bij Vallstein onderbrengt en de WalletSizing^® Enterprise Edition waarbij u heft in eigen hand neemt.

KYC Compliance

Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance regulation has proved to be one of the biggest operational challenges banks, accountants, lawyers and similar financial service providers worldwide have had to overcome.

World-Check, the industry standard KYC compliance solution, provides an overview of KYC compliance and its origins, and outlines the compliance mandate as applicable to banks, accounting firms, lawyers and other regulated financial service providers – not just in the UK, Europe and the USA, but all around the world. Relied upon by more than 3,000 institutions worldwide, this KYC database solution provides effective legal and reputational risk reduction.

Why “Know Your Customer?”


The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre revealed that there were sinister forces at work around the world, and that terrorists activities were being funded with laundered money, the proceeds of illicit activities such as narcotics and human trafficking, fraud and organised crime. Overnight, the combating of terrorist financing became a priority on the international agenda.

For the financial services provider of the 21st century, “knowing your customers” was no longer a suggested course of action. Based on the requirements of legislative landmarks such as the USA PATRIOT Act 2002, modern Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance mandates were created to simultaneously combat money laundering and the funding of terrorist activities.

What is Know Your Customer (KYC)?


Know Your Customer, or KYC, refers to the regulatory compliance mandate imposed on financial service providers to implement a Customer Identification Programme and perform due diligence checks before doing business with a person or entity.

KYC fulfils a risk mitigation function, and one its key requirements is checking that a prospective customer is not listed on any government lists for wanted money launders, known fraudsters or terrorists.

If preliminary KYC checks reveal that the person is a Politically Exposed Person (PEP), for example, Advanced Due Diligence must be done in order to ensure that the person’s source of wealth is transparent, and that he or she does not pose a reputational or financial risk in terms of their finances, public positions or associations. Beyond customer identification checks, the ongoing monitoring of transfers and financial transactions against a range of risk variables forms an integral part of the KYC compliance mandate.

But to understand the importance of KYC compliance for financial service providers better, its origins need to be examined.

Origins of Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance


The arrival of the new millennium was marred by a spate of terrorist attacks and corporate scandals that unmasked the darker features of globalisation. These events highlighted the role of money laundering in cross-border crime and terrorism, and underlined the need to clamp down on the exploitation of financial systems worldwide.

Know Your Customer (KYC) legislation was principally not absent prior to 9/11. Regulated financial service providers for a long time have been required to conduct due diligence and customer identification checks in order to mitigate their own operation risks, and to ensure a consistent and acceptable level of service.

In essence, the USA PATRIOT Act was not so much a radical departure from prior legislation as it was a firmer and more extensive articulation of existing laws. The Act would lead to the more rigorous regulation of a greater range of financial services providers, and expanded the authority of American law enforcement agencies in the fighting of terrorism, both in the USA and abroad.

In October 2001, President George W. Bush signed off the USA PATRIOT Act, effectively providing federal regulators with a new range of tools and powers for fighting terror financing and money laundering. During July 2002, the US Treasury proceeded to introduce Section 326 of the PATRIOT Act, a clause that removed some key burdens for regulators and added significant enforcement muscle to the Act.

What 9/11 changed, in essence, was the extent to which existing legislation was being implemented. Using the provisions of the earlier anti-terrorism USA Act as a foundation, it included the Financial Anti-Terrorism Act, which allowed for federal jurisdiction over foreign money launders and money laundered through foreign banks. Significantly, it is this anti-terror law that would make the creation of an Anti Money Laundering (AML) programme compulsory for all financial institutions and service providers.

Section 326 of the USA PATRIOT Act dealt specifically with the identification of new customers (“CIP regulation”), and made extensive provisions in terms of KYC and the methods employed to verify client identities.

In accordance with this piece of updated KYC legislation, federal regulators would hold financial institutions accountable for the effectiveness of their initial customer identification and ongoing KYC screening. Institutions are required to keep detailed records of the steps that were taken to verify prospective clients’ identities.

Although current KYC legislation does not yet demand the exclusion of specific types of foreign-issued identification, it recommends the usage of machine-verifiable identity documents. The ability to notify financial institutions if concerns regarding specific types of identification were to arise, combined with a risk-based approach to KYC, proved to provide a robust mechanism for addressing security concerns.

Effectively, the risk-based approach to customer due diligence grants regulated institutions a certain degree of flexibility to determine the forms of identification they will accept, and under which conditions.

KYC compliance: Implications for banks, lawyers and accounting firms


The KYC compliance mandate, for all its positive outcomes, has burdened companies and organisations with a substantial administrative obligation. Additionally, KYC compliance increasingly entails the creation of auditable proof of due diligence activities, in addition to the need for customer identification.
With the ever-increasing emphasis on being able to demonstrate adequate anti money laundering procedures and prevention techniques, plus the draconian penalties for those failing to maintain suitable evidence of such activity, no financial institution can afford to be without an automated system such as MLTrac.

MLTrac is part of our portfolio of banking software and is dedicated to identifying, tracking and regulating potentially suspicious or illegal activities in respect of money laundering and/or the proceeds of crime.


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MLTrac enables financial institutions to improve their internal disciplines,supplement their policies and procedures, and make a clear statement to the authorities about their commitment to effective anti money laundering controls.

MLTrac's functionality is based upon a combination of our experience, together with contributions from our customer base and the relevant international financial authorities. Regular updates also take account of any future changes in market requirements and legislation.

Functions:


KYC Document Management - The definition, scanning, management and tracking of customer documentation, and reporting of any deviations.

KYC Account Monitoring -The tracking of movements over account(s) looking for deviations outside of a pre-determined profile.

Manual Watch List Checking. Enter a name and the system will check to see if the name, or like sounding names, appear on any of the watch lists (e.g. OFAC, Bank of England and others) that the system monitors
Message Monitoring. MLTrac can be configured to check all inbound and outbound messages, irrespective of format, to see whether any field (normally the Ordering Customer and Beneficiary) appears on one of the supported checklists. The bank has control over the granularity of the name checking so as not to create too many false alerts. Messages that fail Watch List Checking are put to a quarantine queue for manual intervention. Full Audit Trails of all checks and actions taken is maintained by the system.

Cash Remittances. For the many institutions that originate from a country with a large overseas population the problems associated with accepting cash for remittance back home when taken against the potential ramifications of anti money laundering legislation means that the business is very risky and, often, not worth doing. The Cash Remittances module does away with this fear. Information concerning the remitter is maintained as part of the KYC Documentation Management module and is displayed and made available to the teller at the point of capturing data. A full record off all remitters and beneficiaries is maintained. Limits can be placed upon the individual remitter and upon the ultimate beneficiary (irrespective of source). The resulting SQL database can be interrogated for unusual payment patterns.

'Super telescope' waiting for technical fix

(CNN) -- When the Southern African Large Telescope -- or "Salt" -- opens its shutter it offers astronomers a view far beyond its location in the vastness of South Africa's semi desert, known as the Karoo.
Distant galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters are all in the reach of a telescope large enough to see all the way to the edge of the observable universe, back in time to the aftermath of the big bang.
Astronomer Alexei Kniazev is one of the handful of scientists who run experiments for fellow researchers from 15 institutional partners around the world.
"It's the largest mirror in the southern hemisphere, which is 11 meters in diameter, which consists of 91 one-meter hexagonal segments," he told CNN.

Gallery: Southern African Large Telescope

The telescope is so powerful it can record distant objects a billion times too faint to be seen with the naked eye and detect the flame of a candle on the surface of the moon. And it is perfectly positioned to unlock the universe's secrets.
"We are using this telescope to study objects, not in our galaxy, but nearby galaxies, which is practically impossible to do with smaller telescopes," said Kniazev.
"From southern hemisphere, it's possible to study the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. This is not possible to see from the northern hemisphere. And only from southern hemisphere is it possible to study Magellanic clouds, which are [the] nearest galaxies."
But instead of gazing at the heavens, at the moment Kniazev is forced to study images taken months ago.
Since its launch in 2005, Salt has been hampered by technical problems. Its main instrument, a multi-million dollar spectrograph, sits in a work room, waiting to be re-attached in mid January.
Lead engineer Martin Wilkinson says it's the specialized nature of the instrument that has hamstrung engineers, who must learn as they go in making repairs.

It's using a lot of different technologies that have never been put together in this way before."
--Martin Wilkinson , lead engineer, Salt

He told CNN: "It's quite a unique device. It's the only one in the world really that works in the spectrum we are looking at. The universe is just a mass of energy radiating at all different sorts of wavelengths.
"From that they [researchers] are able to determine, for example, how fast galaxies are moving away or towards us, the constituents of the galaxies, what they are made of, and it gives the astronomers a huge range of information.
"It's using a lot of different technologies that have never been put together in this way before."
While the team says they've been patient throughout the repair process, Kniazev is looking forward to resuming his research.
"In January we put both instruments on the telescope and the telescope becomes 100 percent functional," he said.
For now, Salt remains more a symbol of the promise of astronomy in Africa than a tool for research. But Kniazev and others say that promise is great.

"Helium was discovered by astronomers in the spectrum of the sun, nuclear reactions were discovered by astronomers studying stars, so it means we never know what we will discover in the future and how useful this knowledge will be," he said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/12/01/south.africa.telescope/index.html