BT offering its audit software to other banks.

Bankers Trust Co. is offering its own audit system to other banks, further broadening its recent trend toward marketing its in-house products.

BT Financial Services Information-Systems Corp., the service subsidiary of Bankers Trust, started peddling the 18-month-old software - called BT Audit - to other banks in late June.

Although there have not been any customer installations as yet, Bankers Trust executives expect that selling this and other products outside will leverage the bank's inveent in its own new systems development.

"The beauty of this strategy is that we're leveraging the internal technology," said David Hinds, the managing director for the BT Financial Services Information Systems unit. "We like to think of it as gaining a number of strategic alliances."

BT Audit is said to aid bankers in assessing and controlling their risks.

It enlists a popular groupware application, Lotus Notes, to keep all the information on line and easily accessible to the entire institution. So, for example, junior auditors can enter findings, while their more senior counterparts can simultaneously review the data.

But, according to executives at Bankers Trust, a fairly broadbased user of Lotus Notes, the primary benefit of the software is that it provides a broader overview of the entire audit processing, encouraging banks to focus on areas with the greatest potential for risk.

Rather than subscribe to the notion that "all risks are equal," Mr. Hinds said, bankers can strategically allocate more attention and energy to the business sectors that are most troubled.

The software contains built-in checklists, guidelines, and compliance rules to aid auditors in meeting their objectives and honing in on the most overexposed areas of their business. This also helps financial institutions with the pervasive problem of standardizing the audit process, according to Mr. Hinds.

Bankers Trust also recently started marketing its government securities settlement software.

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