Laws and regulatory bodies such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in the US and the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the UK require organisations to demonstrate oversight on business records and communications. European Credit Management (ECM) selected ClusterSeven technology to comply with the most stringent interpretations of these requirements and with its own internal governance, risk and regulatory compliance (GRC) policies.

London-based investment management firm, ECM has built a global operation specialising in European fixed income. Founded in 1999, ECM implemented the ClusterSeven Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager Software product in 2004, to comply with the FSA's corporate governance requirements. In 2007, Evergreen Investments, the asset management division of Wachovia Corp. (NYSE: WB) acquired a majority interest in ECM.

"We were an early adopter of ClusterSeven's spreadsheet management product, so we naturally turned to ClusterSeven again in order to address our requirements for improving our control of other user-developed applications," comments Michael Cunningham, Head of Technology, European Credit Management. "We worked together to define the requirements and ClusterSeven has delivered exactly what we needed."

"The very flexibility that makes end user solutions such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Office Access such valuable business tools can also pose risk," says Kathleen Wilhide, Research Director for Governance, Risk and Compliance at IDC. "End users are comfortable building sophisticated applications with these tools at the desktop, but the complexity can result in errors or inconsistent updates that impact the integrity of information, putting companies at risk of heavy fines and potential damage to their reputation. An ever increasing regulatory environment requires companies to take notice of such activities and the operational risks they present."

"Use of Microsoft Office Access is typically not as widespread throughout an organisation as spreadsheets, but that does not reduce the operational risk to the entire organisation," said Steve Semenzato, founder and CEO, ClusterSeven. "Just one instance of poor oversight can trigger an investigation. Auditors and regulators require a precise understanding of who touched what information, when and why. ClusterSeven's technologies monitor these activities and alerts appropriate personnel of anything suspicious, without disrupting daily business operations."

Microsoft Office Access is a relational database management system and part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. ClusterSeven ADM provides an organisation with detailed oversight of records created and managed in Access, and monitors these activities with no impact to the end user. ClusterSeven ADM saves time by removing many manual checks, creates a centralised and auditable history and clearly separates the roles of the business users and operational risk managers, all key requirements of most compliance legislation including those established by SOX and the FSA. ClusterSeven ADM draws on the proven architecture of ClusterSeven's Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager Software product, which provides the same oversight capabilities over an organisation's spreadsheets created using popular programs such as Excel and Google Docs.