From Compulsory Accountability to Competitive Advantage

• Is the lack of corporate accountability increasing your exposure to the risks associated with audits, regulatory compliance or litigation issues?
• Is your employee productivity crippled by limited access to widely dispersed pockets of unconnected corporate information
• Are submissions for regulatory compliance delayed due to lack of – or worse, a limited or ineffective – records management system?

Compliance and Litigation Issues: Financial institutions – banks, brokerage houses, insurance providers, credit card firms and other businesses that deal with other people’s money – as well as other publicly-traded corporations and major institutions that depend on the public trust – now face strict federal evidentiary rules, along with other legal and operational demcivands that require new levels of sophistication. Managing information has become both a business priority and a legal obligation — effective data and records management, once the province of mid-level managers, now demands the attention of C-level executives and corporate boards. Compliance failure can make financial institutions lose investor trust and confidence – and can now lead to stiff criminal and costly civil penalties.

Perhaps no development since the enactment of a federal procedural code has transformed the practice of litigation more than the electronic storage of business records and correspondence – including email correspondence, which now must have an electronic permanence and ease of retrieval that was once normally accorded only to formal business correspondence. As a corporate priority, records management has clearly come to the forefront — in part because of sweeping new Federal legislation and regulations surrounding today’s business practices and processes, and in part because the effective retrieval of all records and correspondence has become an operational necessity as well.

This is why data management has to become the core business of every large public company, financial institution – and even publicly-accountable charities and non-profit organizations. When it comes to data and records, business-process efficiency has already become a crisis-level situation for many under-fire corporations.

That’s where Data Empowerment Group comes in …

Order out of Chaos: The sheer volume of electronic records can easily turn records management into a kind of organized chaos – and this chaos makes management of these records high risk, with a high probability of serious and profoundly negative consequences. Well–respected companies have been scandalized by errant e–mails or ill-advised clean ups.

Financial services companies are particularly vulnerable — in the face of increased judicial and regulatory scrutiny, they need better ways to manage, access, store, secure, and retrieve the high volume of documentation that characterizes their industry. In banking, investments, and insurance, an interlocking web of legal and regulatory requirements compounds this challenge, and increases the serious consequences and risks of non-compliance.

Compliance – No Longer Optional: Regulations such as SEC 17a–4 govern electronic communication storage requirements for financial services firms, while privacy act provisions and court guidelines for legal discovery responses collide head-on with corporate needs to reduce operating costs and improve margins.

Data Empowerment Group has the answers to these challenges. Our software and programs bridge the gaps between existing systems – and can help reduce the overall cost of compliance to the business. For instance, we offer:

• RecordsEdge™ — A family of tools designed to apply records management controls from an ECM system to multiple vendor enterprise content repositories
• TagMaster™ – Information classifications plug–ins for Microsoft Office applications ,Outlook and Lotus Notes
• LoadStream™ – Data flow control software for automating the process of content extraction and loading
• Data Rescue - Application and recovery service for lost data from enterprise systems and media
• Records Management Readiness Workshops – low-cost, high-intensity programs to identify your specific records management needs, and the solutions best suited to your enterprise

It’s high time to get your records under control. To learn more, call us at (702) 289–4230 or email sales@dataempowerment.com today!