Alacra, the leader in client onboarding, reference data and business research solutions, has announced a formal alliance with NICE Actimize, a NICE Systems (NASDAQ:NICE) business and the largest provider of financial crime, risk and compliance software for the global financial services industry. The alliance will integrate Alacra’s market-leading customer onboarding and Know-Your-Customer (KYC) tools into the NICE Actimize Customer Due Diligence (CDD) anti-money laundering (AML) solution. The combined offering will create one of the most advanced and innovative customer scoring engines and risk assessment tools in the marketplace.

Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, commented: “NICE Actimize is a leading force in anti-money laundering solutions, and we are looking forward to bringing our proven client onboarding and reference data integration tools and technology to its customers and their implementation of CDD capabilities. Having access to a multiple sources of Politically Exposed People (PEPs), sanctions and enforcement lists, as well as adverse news, will give financial institutions enhanced capabilities to be fully compliant with the latest AML and know-your-customer standards.”

“Our customers and industry regulators have been demanding a more integrated tool to assess risk with their customer base,” said Joe Friscia, president, NICE Actimize. “By combining NICE Actimize workflow and analytics functionality with the know-your-customer, reference data tools from Alacra, we have created one of the industry’s most advanced and comprehensive risk assessment tools.”

Delivering a complete customer risk solution, the main benefits of the joint product include: a unified interface for searching, accessing and appending negative news content to risk-rating reports; automation of a review process via alerts (based on data changes and “new negative news”); a scoring engine based on hundreds of built-in risk factors and algorithms.

With full integration to third-party data providers and proactive, real-time monitoring of breaking news, clients will have immediate access to the information they need to make critical decisions.