Applications & Technology

THE ALACRA COMPLIANCE WEB AND GOOGLE SEARCH

We are thrilled to announce the deployment of Google Search Appliances in Alacra Compliance Web. The Alacra Compliance Web is a vertical search engine designed to facilitate and accelerate the account vetting process for financial institutions. This tool is an integral part of Alacra Compliance, which helps banks and broker/dealers employ a consistent, comprehensive and documented process for Customer Identification Programs (CIP), Know-Your-Customer (KYC) efforts and Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) to meet Patriot Act, BSA and FSA regulatory requirements. The Alacra Compliance Web is a continuously updated index of more than 500 global regulatory websites including stock exchanges, government regulatory agencies and insurance regulators. These sites are typically used by researchers when vetting prospective clients and conducting remediation on existing accounts.

Specific features include:

• Google Quality and Ranking - Find the highest quality and most relevant documents; Google factors in more than 100 variables for each query. A compliance-specific taxonomy, including sites hand-selected and classified by Alacra Content Analysts helps users quickly identify the most critical information within their results
• Dynamic Page Summaries - Judge the relevance of results more easily with dynamically generated snippets showing your query, in bold text, within the context of the page.
• Multi-lingual capabilities, to reflect the diverse needs of our global client base

ALACRA CURRENT AWARENESS UPDATE

Current Awareness has been a major focus for Alacra in the third quarter. Most recently Factiva, Mergermarkets, Moody’s , S&P and Credit Sights have all been added to the list of sources available via this co-mingled alerting mechanism. Delivered as an email, RSS feed and now to your PDA, this application is gaining a lot of traction in the marketplace. Additionally our reworked user interface offers users a streamlined way to simply view, edit or create alerts.

ALACRA PREMIUM "WHITE BAR" SEARCH ENHANCEMENTS

As many Alacra users know, there are generally two ways to search simultaneously across multiple Premium Databases in Alacra. You can search by keywords/criteria in the "Advanced Database Search" tool from within the Apps menu, or, you search across all the databases simultaneously, using a keyword(s) in what is referred to as the "white bar" search in the main Alacra toolbar.

In the past, these two searches operated a bit differently, now, however, the "white bar" and the Alacra Advanced Databases Search work in the exact same manner. Alacra has modified and updated this tool by incorporating all 100+ Alacra premium databases into the Advanced Search, significantly enhancing the search experience and the ability to quickly find what you need. If you’re just searching key words, white bar is the quickest; if you’d like to add parameters such as industry, category of information, country or date, then the Advanced Database Search is better suited for your needs. Highlights include:

• White bar search now federates your search to all relevant Alacra databases: sources such as ALM, Access Intelligence, Mergermarket Intelligence, Mintel and Voxant, previously only available through a database-specific search, are now included in white bar
• A tabbed user interface makes it easier to view and navigate your results
• The results page now shows the number of results for each content source (the previous version required you to click into each source to see the number of results) .