Two New Executives Lead Growth of Alacra Risk Products

The recent hire of two key new executives charged with leading the continued growth of Alacra’s regulatory compliance and reference data management services.

Driving changes to the way financial services firms handle client, prospect and counterparty data are regulatory mandates around Know Your Customer, Anti-Money Laundering, operational and credit risk assessments. Further, there is a burgeoning industry movement toward mitigating exposure with a comprehensive view of individuals, legal entities and their linkages.

Since 2004, Alacra has been providing its client on-boarding workflow tool, data integration, and legal entity mapping services to 20 large, global financial institutions and professional service firms. On the back of explosive first quarter growth in Risk Products, Alacra is poised to capture additional market share in 2011 with two award-winning products,  Alacra Compliance and Alacra Concordance, under the guidance of two key new hires — Tom Cosgrove, Vice President of Risk Products, and Ed Zier, Vice President of Sales for the Americas.

Alacra Compliance is an entity investigation, risk alerting and re-screening tool that addresses regulatory and risk requirements with an efficient, consistent and documented vetting process employing simultaneous searches across regulatory watch lists, subscription-access content and web resources. With Alacra Compliance, Onboarding, Know Your Customer, Financial Crime and Credit Investigations departments can speedily gather the evidence and create the investigation reports they need, while employing existing workflow procedures and processes and incorporating business rules and logic into each and every search.

Alacra Concordance aligns disparate internal proprietary and external vendor data stores to create an accurate, comprehensive and always up-to-date view of customer, prospect, and counterparty entities. Atop a central authority file that maps company, equity, industry and proprietary identifiers, Alacra Concordance can identify entity relationships, incorporate corporate events alerting, and efficiently link organizations’ regulatory compliance, risk management, and CRM applications.

“We are thrilled to welcome these two seasoned industry veterans,” said Steve Goldstein, Alacra CEO. “Tom and Ed will continue to ensure exceptional service to key clients, actively engage client feedback to guide further product enhancements, and help navigate Alacra’s business through this current growth phase.”

Tom Cosgrove joins Alacra as Vice President of Risk Products. Prior to joining Alacra, he held various senior management positions for Thomson Reuters in product and content management and was the Business Information Manager for Goldman Sachs’ Investment Banking Data Group. Most recently, Tom held the position of Vice President of Information Services for Virtusa, a global application development outsourcing firm focused on solutions for printing and publishing, content management, digital asset management and CRM integration.

Ed Zier joins Alacra Vice President of Sales for the Americas. Ed has more than  25 years of financial information sales experience, spanning both entrepreneurial and multinational companies. Ed began his career with CompuServe, the pioneer in online services, managing several commercial sales organizations. He later led the sales and marketing efforts of Baseline, an entrepreneurial effort focused on institutional investors. Following an acquisition, Ed became Managing Director of Thomson overseeing six sales teams. Prior to joining Alacra, Ed had his own consulting business, helping financial information companies build and execute their top line strategies.