The new facilities were developed to provide services to Fin-Scan's rapidly growing European client base, and they complement the Group's other facilities in Pittsburgh, Cayman Islands, Canada, and London, UK. Fin-Scan is a German registered company offering clients the protection of German data privacy laws.

The Innovative Group has been serving Europe's leading financial and insurance institutions, gaming organizations, charities, and other industries for more than 25 years. Client concerns regarding customer privacy drove the decision to open the new facility in Frankfurt, where clients are provided the protection of German rules and regulations.

With the new data center, European clients have the option of secure Software as a Service (SaaS), or "hosted," processing for the Innovative Group's five business lines: Data Quality, Master Data Management (MDM), Data Discovery and Profiling, Address Validation, and, especially, customer-focused sanctions and Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) list screening to meet the requirements of the Third EU Directive.

"Facing government compliance mandates, many European firms are interested in a proven solution that offers ease of implementation and is cost-effective," explained Michael Ott, Innovative's senior vice president. "Our Fin-Scan Hosted PEP and sanctions screening solution has been used by clients since 1998 and utilizes best practices developed over years of experience. Clients can now choose from any of our sites to transmit their data. They can license solutions or use the Internet to reach secure servers to match their customers against their preferred sanctions or PEP database, using matching parameters they define. All suspect 'hits' are returned to them in a case management tool for review."

Clients are able to tune Innovative's software to meet their definition of quality. Innovative's professional services group assists in the set up process so that production can be done oe done on demand and data is returned in the matter specified by the client. Compared to the traditional model of licensing and operating software solutions in-house, Innovative's hosted processing significantly reduces the client's investment as well as the ongoing demands on their internal personnel and hardware resources.

"We're very pleased to provide our European clients with the added service and security offered by our Frankfurt data center," said Bob Colonna, Innovative Group's president and CEO. "Having a secure data center in Germany protected by EU data privacy laws enables us to offer European organizations the valuable option of hosted processing to meet their data quality and PEP screening needs."