Serasa, one of the world's largest analysis and credit decision and support companies; DMR Consulting, a multi-national business and information technology consulting firm; and Mantas, a leading global compliance and operational risk management solutions firm, have formed a strategic partnership, officially set to launch Wednesday June 21, 2006.

New legislation in Brazil now holds the financial institutions liable if they process criminals' illegally gained money into "clean" money that appears legitimately earned by placing the responsibility for identifying and reporting suspicious transactions directly on financial institutions. Despite the severity of the law, recent scandals in the public sector and the continued success of organized crime demonstrate that current systems are inadequate.

The new joint Anti-Money Laundering (AML) service offering by Serasa, DMR Consulting, and Mantas will offer banks a powerful and robust solution for anti-money laundering with a lower cost of implementation and operation. "Brazilian financial institutions are now seeing the risks of money laundering both in meeting regulations, as well as with their reputation with customers," said Pablo Morales, Partner-Director of Financial Entities, DMR Consulting. "The direct loss of market value coupled with sanctions by regulators is another strong motivator for implementing real solutions to address money laundering."

The joint AML service is based on a highly scalable model that makes it possible for medium and smaller banks to leverage the same advanced behavior detection technology used by the largest global financial institutions in 211 jurisdictions. The solution detects fraudulent activities during the money laundering cycle by analyzing structured transactions, hidden relationships, and other "suspicious behaviors" that indicate money laundering, while reducing false positives. By mitigating the risk of exposure to regulatory and reputation risk, firms are able to address the crime of money laundering in an easy to deploy and easy to maintain solution.

Edison Antonio Manzano, Compliance Director at Banco Real in São Paulo noted, "The coverage provided by the Mantas AML solution provides Banco Real with the confidence to mitigate potential regulatory and reputational risks."

According to Simon Moss, CEO, Mantas, "The market for cross market risk management represents a significant opportunity. To succeed, you need an impeccable and acknowledged reputation, technology to identify risks quickly and the ability to implement and locally support the solution at a compelling price. The combination of Serasa, Mantas and DMR respectively present a combined portfolio that presents the Brazilian Banking industry with the opportunity to lead the world in providing seamless Credit, AML and Risk Management to all banks, no matter what size."