READING, UNITED KINGDOM and BILLERICA, MA — (Marketwire) — 12/12/11 — , a business of Harte-Hanks, Inc. (NYSE: HHS) and a leading enabler of Total Data Quality solutions, today announced the launch of the , a service to assist financial institutions in their preparations for compliance with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). This new directive of the United States government requires foreign financial institutions (FFIs) with U.S. client accounts to share information on those customers with the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), ensuring that U.S. individuals report income above certain levels earned outside the United States. FATCA will substantially impact financial institutions that interact with U.S. clients and markets. Tens of thousands of institutions are estimated to be affected worldwide, including banks, insurance companies, brokers, and investment firms.
“FATCA requires that financial institutions demonstrate the capability to identify U.S. investors and then disclose required information on them to U.S. authorities,” said Christine Pratt, senior analyst at Aite Group. “This is likely to be a sizeable challenge to many firms, which may need to make significant changes to the type of customer and transaction data they identify, capture, store, analyze and report.”
Failing to comply with FATCA, which comes into effect in 2013, will be costly to an institution and could result in a 30 percent withholding tax on all payments from U.S. sources.
The Trillium FATCA Compliance Data Assessment helps FFIs measure the state of their data for enabling the identification of U.S. accounts and the sharing of necessary information as required by the act. The assessment provides a detailed -map of the gaps,- allowing firms to determine and plan any data or process remediation activity that will be required to ensure that data is fit to support the requirements of the act on an on-going basis.
The assessment enables firms to establish benchmarks and metrics that will help determine, in precise detail, the scope of the FATCA project challenge at an enterprise scale. This achieved, financial institutions can then assess, for example, Client ID, account origination and master data management processes as well as other systems to verify that they support the mandated data gathering, analysis and reporting tasks, or determine appropriate actions.
The assessment combines a purpose-built data quality platform with unmatched data analysis expertise and professional consulting services. The platform leverages pre-populated rules and templates that facilitate the automated assessment, measurement and monitoring of key indicia of the qualification criteria for FATCA reporting. This assessment includes review of all data elements necessary for determining U.S. ownership of an account and status review, for determining reporting as defined by the act. The assessment leverages over two decades of experience supporting the complex requirements of data management across global enterprises, including many of the world-s largest financial institutions. The process readily discovers -unknown- issues and presents findings in ways that enable business understanding and facilitates transparency in regulatory reporting.
The Trillium FATCA Compliance Data Assessment is one of a number of designed to help organisations ensure that the quality of the data feeding into critical risk measurement and monitoring processes provides the transparency and control required, including for Basel II, Basel III, Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and Solvency II. To learn more, about these solutions, click or contact at +44 (0)118 940 7666 or from within the US at (978) 436-8900.
Harte-Hanks® is a worldwide direct and targeted marketing company that provides direct marketing services and shopper advertising opportunities to local, regional, national and international consumer and business-to-business marketers. Visit the Harte-Hanks Web site at or call (800) 456-9748.
Harte-Hanks Trillium Software® enables organisations to achieve Total Data Quality by providing a full complement of technologies and services providing global data profiling, data cleansing, enhancement, and data linking for e-business, customer relationship management, data governance, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, data warehouse, and other enterprise applications. For more information about Trillium Software and its offerings, call (978) 436-8900 in the United States and in the United Kingdom call +44 (0) 118 940 7666, or visit Trillium Software online at .
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Media Contact:
Michael Antonellis
Harte-Hanks Trillium Software
(978) 439-3813
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