NEW YORK, December 11 /PRNewswire/ --

- First System Built Specifically for Money Laundering and Fraud Cases

A new tool for streamlining and automating financial crimes
investigations gives financial institutions a centralized view of suspicious
customer behavior, Fortent announced today with the launch of its Fortent
Investigate product.

Fortent Investigate represents an important step forward in "case
management," the process that takes a financial crime case from the initial
alert to the reporting of the suspicious transaction to law enforcement and
regulators. Fortent's is the only case management system on the market today
built with a "compliance logic"; i.e., it was created by Fortent's anti-money
laundering (AML) and fraud experts expressly to manage alerts,
investigations, and reporting for financial institutions' compliance
processes. While Investigate can also be used to manage a wide variety of
"case worthy" events at banks, such as an operating loss, its particular
compliance focus is a departure from more generic case tools on the market.

Fortent Investigate addresses an increased concern of both regulators and
the banks themselves that banks have a standardized, enterprise-wide system
to analyze, conduct, and report their financial crime cases, vs. the
traditional single-channel approach. Providing a centralized view of
suspicious behavior, Investigate lets managers and investigators see what is
happening in different business lines.

For example, the system can detect when a customer who has committed
fraud in one area of a bank tries to go through another channel at the bank
to conduct business. The rise in cross-channel fraud - which accounted for
approximately 40% of all deposit account fraud in 2007, according to the
American Bankers Association - has prompted banks to seek safeguards to
prevent fraudsters from moving across banking channels to commit crimes.

Financial firms are also trying to rein in the growing costs associated
with investigating fraud and money laundering alerts.

"Banks are looking for ways to lower their compliance costs as they
grapple with market volatility and budget pressures," says Sandy Jaffee, CEO
and Chairman of Fortent. "One way to achieve this is to standardize the
investigation process and eliminate redundancy between different lines of
business."

Key components of the Fortent Investigate technology have been in place
for over 10 years. Northern Trust bank, a long-time Fortent client, says that
Fortent technology has helped it respond rapidly to organizational change.

"Fortent's workflow has significantly improved the effectiveness of our
AML alert management process," says John D. Larson, SVP/AML Monitoring and
Investigations at Northern Trust. "One of the things we have been able to do
is create and automate a 90-day alert review process to measure the nature of
the SARs we file to better meet regulatory expectations."

"We've been adding workflow features to our existing monitoring product,
and continue to look for innovative ways to utilize the tremendous
flexibility of Fortent's case management solution," Mr. Larson adds.

About Fortent

Fortent provides risk and compliance solutions to financial institutions,
government agencies, and individuals in more than 100 countries. With
advanced systems endorsed by the American Bankers Association, Fortent's
market-leading technology, information, and training businesses help clients
fight financial crime and achieve regulatory compliance throughout their
global operations. For more information visit http://www.fortent.com