Atlanta-based Proactive Inc. has set its sights on serving the industry's biggest players after snagging CoreStates Financial Corp. as a customer.
Since it was started in 1993, the compliance software vendor's business has been composed mainly of small banks. But with $27 billion in assets, Philadelphia-based CoreStates is Proactive's largest customer and may represent a new market for the company.
Proactive is looking to take on banks with more than $100 billion in assets, said Dale Johnson, the company's president, in an interview Tuesday.
"Up to this point we sold mostly to community banks," Mr. Johnson said. "The bigger guys have said, 'We've got our own systems.'"
But Mr. Johnson said that attitude is ebbing.
"Of the 25 biggest banks, we have proposals in front of 14 of them," he said. "The climate somehow has changed to where the largest institutions are interested in this kind of product. A year ago they weren't."
The proposals before the big banks feature CompliancePro, the company's leading software product, which walks a banker through regulations, asking questions about compliance such as whether particular disclosures were made to consumers.
The step-by-step prompting program operates on a network of personal computers, which allows wide distribution throughout a bank.
"Most large banks have some kind of system that covers everything now, but they are looking for a more efficient way to do the work," Mr. Johnson said.
Paul L. Berkebile, a vice president at CoreStates, said the bank considered coming up with its own software to do the job, but decided CompliancePro was the best bet.
"We feel in the long run it will enable us to more closely monitor our compliance with regulations, particularly consumer regulations, by providing our divisional compliance officers with a standardized approach and the tools necessary to detect emerging regulatory concerns," he said.
When a bank buys a monitoring system like CompliancePro, it sacrifices the ability to customize the software. But then it also is freed of the responsibility for keeping up with regulatory changes. Proactive updates its software to incorporate what's happening in Washington.
Proactive has 165 bank customers using the system in 32 states. It was bought last March by U.S. Banking Alliance Inc., an Atlanta-based management consulting company for banks.
Mr. Lumetta writes for Medill News Service.
