Compliance Technology
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AML Solutions Are Comprehensive, Consolidated--and Costly
August 14, 2007
"In order to be able to understand the risk across the enterprise, you have to be able to bring all the relevant data together," said Stephen Epstein, VP of product management at Mantas, a Herndon, Va.-based AML software specialist. "What gets in the way of that is the pressure on cost."
Mantas, which is part of Oracle Corp.-controlled I-flex Solutions, has entered into relationships with Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) as a platform partner and BEA Systems as a technology partner, with the aim of offering better enterprisewide products.
As have other vendors, Mantas has watched institutional firms place their bets on AML software and has turned its attention to the lower-tier market. In the process, the suppliers have become mindful of the cost issues that firms large and small are dealing with. "We've really been focusing more on the mid-tier market in the AML space because firms are coming under greater pressure to better manage costs," said Epstein. "A lot of what we're doing in terms of leveraging HP technology, their blade servers and their new support around different types of 64-bit computing, is percolating its way back up to the top of the Mantas stack. Some of our larger customers are looking at the Mantas BEA and HP offering."
Epstein said that Mantas has "been leveraging [its] product with HP's application server and data collection and distribution methods and BEA's technology to package more cost-effective, high-performing solutions for the market to better integrate information into our AML solution. We've been working with HP on expanding our Web services to pull information into Mantas, which we post out to other systems. We also pull alerts from other systems you may have in your firm to form one consolidated Mantas alert list."
"BEA is testing a lot of our Web services now to make sure that their product works with our Web services architecture, with the goal to create this consolidated alert list on Mantas across the enterprise," Epstein continued. "That's something BEA and Mantas have been working on actively, and it is really helping our push to be an enterprise compliance vendor."
Hardware Costs
The availability of scalable, blade computing architectures helps newer customers to "deploy a smaller Mantas footprint [and] over time add more blades as you bring in more data, more business units, and run more scenarios," Epstein said. "So your initial investment is smaller and it grows as your business grows."
He added that Mantas has worked closely with its partners on support and around-the-clock service, "so if you're running these products, you can call the Mantas support center and we will work with HP and BEA to resolve the issues."
Human resources come into play in transaction monitoring: Even where alerts are generated by automated systems, staff is needed to interpret them. Mantas customer U.S. Trust Co. became the beta site for parent Charles Schwab, before U.S. Trust was recently acquired by Bank of America.
