Alacra's Concordance and Compliance products enable clients to seamlessly search and retrieve company, security and industry reference data from multiple providers through one single interface and request process. Through this alliance agreement, Alacra's Concordance and Compliance customers will have access to CounterpartyLink's full list of maintained reference data. This data is collected from sources, and maintained to standards, required in today's regulatory compliance environment. This data specifically enables subscribers to collect data required for Know your Customer (KYC) processes for any registered entity in the world, with the knowledge that all information delivered has a link back to the source it came from. These are typically national and regional company registry authorities, regulators and stock exchanges.

"Our alliance with CounterpartyLink further strengthens Alacra's Concordance and Compliance services by enabling the many other data sets that we carry to be seamlessly linked to a core legal entity record - the characteristics of which are specifically shaped by regulatory requirements under MiFID, Basel II and other initiatives in the increasingly regulated market in which financial services operate" said Steve Goldstein, CEO at Alacra.

Compliance with regulatory initiatives such as MiFID and Basel II require financial institutions to properly categorize and assess the operational risk from clients and financial counterparties. Meanwhile, KYC requirements under the Patriot Act, Bank Secrecy Act and FSA have placed new demands on financial institutions to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing. To meet these requirements, financial institutions must bring together data from disparate internal and external databases, to gain a comprehensive understanding of their counterparties.

"Alacra's ability to link our data to the wealth of other related content that it carries adds another dimension to CounterpartyLink's data, and significantly enhances the ability for clients to retrieve, use and also integrate such content into their own applications. This brings significant efficiencies with regards to cross linking different data sets to CounterpartyLink's data, and also strengthens both parties' offerings in some specific areas of an organisation's operations, such as in the account opening process" said Christoph Lammersdorf, CEO of CounterpartyLink.