U.S. POSTAL SERVICE COMMENDS INFORMATION BUILDERS

Information Builders announced that its Consulting division completed the initial rollout of the Compliance and Anti-Money Laundering System for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). In keeping with the extensive data entry, analysis, and reporting requirements of the USPS's Bank Secrecy Act Compliance Office (BSA), Information Builders used its S/390 FOCUS application development and reporting environment to build a decision support system to help the Postal Service track purchase trends that may indicate money-laundering operations. The new system has garnered a letter of commendation from U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, and is considered a standard for Bank Secrecy Act compliance and anti-money laundering controls.

The USPS BSA System provides a way to double-check suspicious money orders to ferret out patterns that may indicate money-laundering activities. Users can create the reports they need, formatted in a variety of ways. For example, users might want to see all the money orders paid to a certain name through a particular account within a specified date range, formatted to their requirements. With FOCUS, it's all online and can be done in real time.

High on the target list of criminals, The system is designed to uncover "smurfs" -- agents of organized drug operations who "clean" illicit cash by purchasing money orders and other negotiable instruments. Smurfs are high on the target list of criminals. "We want the smurfs to know that we now have a highly sophisticated way of tracking their activities," said Henry Gibson, the BSA Compliance Officer who works with Corporate Treasury, USPS, headquartered in Washington, D.C. "We already have some evidence that our BSA Anti-Money Laundering System has given us an edge in deterring the criminal element from using money orders and other postal money instruments to get their cash proceeds into legitimate financial accounts."

"We are extremely proud to have met the stringent business requirements laid out by the United States Postal Service," said Gerald D. Cohen, president of Information Builders. "This sophisticated analysis and reporting system is giving the Postal Service one of its best weapons in the war against criminal money-laundering efforts."

Like all other money service businesses in the country, the U.S. Postal Service must comply with aggressive federal anti-money laundering laws and regulations. Unlike other money services businesses, however, the Postal Service must also ensure that its more than 100,000 sales and services Associates, who sell financial services products offered by the Postal Service, comply with the reporting requirements of the federal laws.

The new FOCUS-based anti-money laundering system was designed as a comprehensive solution to capture suspicious transactions involving money orders, funds transfers, and stored value cards at USPS outlets. The system includes highly sophisticated drill-down, querying, and reporting to allow postal officials to track trends that may indicate organized money-laundering operations. These are not run-of-the-mill queries; some very intricate, complicated processes have to take place in order to report intelligently on this data in an online environment.

More than 600,000 suspicious money orders are currently stored in an IBM DB2 database in an IBM S/390 mainframe computer in San Mateo, California. When a postal sales and services associate files a Suspicious Transaction Report (STR) on a money order transaction, it goes to the USPS BSA Compliance Support Group. The information is entered into the system using the FOCUS application. Meanwhile, at the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB), another system flags suspected money orders based on parameters established by the USPS. Digitized images of the suspect money orders are made available to the U.S. Postal Service for physical review and analysis. Data from those money orders considered suspect after review are entered into the USPS BSA System and matched to the money orders filed by postal sales and services associates.

About Information Builders

Information Builders supplies market-leading Web business intelligence and enterprise integration solutions. The combined strengths of these core technologies provide organizations with the ability to dynamically transform any data on any platform into valuable, usable business information. This information can be distributed immediately via the Web to customers, employees, and partners throughout the world. This unique and comprehensive solution known as i-business makes dynamic, scalable, and cost-effective e-business applications possible.

Headquartered in New York City, Information Builders is one of the largest independently owned software companies in the world, with more than 5,000 customer sites, including 90 of the Fortune 100, currently using its core technologies. The company employs more than 2,000 professionals worldwide and generated revenues exceeding $340 million in 1999. To learn more about Information Builders' products and services, point your Web browser to www.informationbuilders.com .

Contact Kathleen Moran of Information Builders, 212-736-4433, or kathleen_moran@ibi.com.