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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
By Smoothly Aggregating Disparate Financial Data, Alacra Concordance Offered Nearly $2 Million in Savings in Productivity and Labor Costs
New York, NY, October 3, 2007 � Alacra Concordance, a solution that allows financial institutions and professional service firms to smoothly integrate disparate financial and corporate information, offered users a 402 percent return on investment, according to a new commissioned study � The Total Economic Impact? of Alacra Concordance � conducted by Forrester Consulting, an independent research firm, on behalf of Alacra. In addition, the study found that Alacra Concordance paid for itself within two months of use, and offered a total net value close to $2 million.
Every day, banking and financial companies compile timely, accurate data about deals, potential transactions and important investment opportunities. However, the majority of that key financial and market data is provided by a variety of business information companies � all with proprietary formats and descriptions. The challenge for these companies that Alacra Concordance addresses is to compile the disparate proprietary data sources, combine those with public information, and keep all the information up-to-date as companies merge, acquire and change.
Alacra, Inc., a leading provider of online business information solutions, developed its Concordance Solution to solve the problems that many organizations have in maintaining accurate and timely data from a multitude of information sources. Typically, financial companies use a variety of methods to maintain accurate data, including using internal data analysts and bankers to manage information that frequently changes due to market conditions and other factors.
The new TEI study reports that, �Forrester found two areas of significant benefit, in the form of: a) productivity improvements for high-value banking personnel, and b) the internal labor cost savings from manually �concording� or indexing entity identifiers and matching those with a firm�s own data, information, and knowledge.�
�We knew that our customers were seeing immediate and substantial financial and efficiency benefits within their organizations from Alacra Concordance, but this new Forrester study validates those benefits even more than we realized,� said Steven Goldstein, chairman and CEO of Alacra. �With the alphabet soup of entity identifiers, both proprietary and public, a job that should theoretically be simple can easily turn into a huge and unrelenting investment of time and resources just to manually keep track of key data elements. We developed Alacra Concordance to tackle this problem faced by virtually every financial institution and professional services firm, and it is clear that it meets the challenge.�
In addition to using Alacra Concordance to connect disparate data for current reports and documents, organizations can also use Concordance�s streamlined data to build new tools or applications. Leveraging Alacra Concordance: �You can build something that has value for just about anybody in the bank for probably one tenth the price of a Bloomberg terminal,� one Alacra Concordance customer said, according to the Total Economic Impact study.
Total Economic Impact Study Quantifies Benefits of Alacra Concordance
For the Total Economic Impact? of Alacra Concordance study, Forrester Consulting conducted in-depth interviews with four current Alacra financial services industry customers and created a composite organization that represented a $30 billion diversified financial services company.
Using this composite organization of Alacra customers, Forrester studied multiple areas to determine its findings. Forrester quantified the costs of Alacra Concordance (initial setup fee, annual maintenance fee and the internal labor costs to implement Concordance). Forrester also quantified the benefits of Alacra Concordance by determining a dollar figure for the greater efficiency for financial professionals, and the costs saved from their not having to manually match and manage the data that Alacra Concordance automatically organizes.
After studying these figures, Forrester Consulting concluded that the composite company realized a 402 percent return on investment, and that the company paid for its use of Concordance within two months. The composite company realized $1,911,163 in cost savings by using the Alacra Concordance Solution.
�Financial services companies continuously study and test procedures and solutions to reduce their costs in delivering their services,� Mr. Goldstein said. �With the quantifiable results revealed in the Total Economic Impact? of Alacra Concordance study, we think the Alacra Concordance Solution is a great tool that companies can use to automate an otherwise manual, labor intensive procedure, both improving accuracy and saving money.�
Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent technology and market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. For more information visit: http://www.forrester.com/FactSheet .
About Alacra, Inc.
Alacra creates sophisticated online technology and services to help clients find, package and present business information. Financial institutions, professional service firms and other corporations have long used the same content sets to support clients, research deals and investigate market opportunities. The Alacra mission is to package this content and deliver it in a format that best meets each organization's precise needs.
Worldwide, more than 400 investment and commercial banks, management consulting firms, law firms, and other corporations, representing 50,000+ end users worldwide, use Alacra to effectively find and deploy business information in their daily workflow. For more information, visit www.alacra.com.
Click here to request a copy of the complete Total Economic Impact of Alacra Concordance study.
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