21 August 2008, Sydney, Australia - Norkom Technologies, the leading provider of financial crime and compliance management solutions to the global financial services sector, has today announced that Australia’s financially strongest building society, Newcastle Permanent Building Society, has joined its expanding customer list.

Founded in 1903 and voted Building Society of the Year for two consecutive years in 2007 and 2008 by Money Magazine, Newcastle Permanent chose Norkom’s pre-packaged compliance solutions to help it meet the Anti-Money Laundering/Counter Terrorist Financing legislation that was passed in Australia in December 2006. Under the terms of the deal, Newcastle Permanent will deploy Norkom’s solutions across its Australian operations.

With Norkom’s AML software, Newcastle Permanent will be able to monitor transactions across all members and accounts to detect, investigate, manage and report suspicious and criminal behaviour. When unusual activity is identified, prioritised alerts will be automatically issued to a team of investigators to begin a comprehensive, step-by-step investigation process to uncover potential criminal behaviour. Using Norkom’s Watch List Management solution, Newcastle Permanent will be automatically alerted if any entity attempting to transact with the institution is listed on any of the industry’s numerous watch lists, ensuring it does not inadvertently conduct business with known terrorists or criminals.

Bruce Quick, Norkom’s Director of Sales & Business Development for Asia Pacific, says, “We are really pleased to welcome Newcastle Permanent to our ever-expanding list of clients”. In explaining the company’s reasons for launching pre-packaged applications, Quick says, “Every financial institution in Australia, whether they’re large or small, needs to meet the demands of the regulator. Since our entry into this market in October 2006, we’ve served the regulatory needs of the larger institutions. However, we soon realised that smaller financial services providers who are deemed as Designated Entities are struggling with the same regulatory demands and need a solution that will help them comply with the AML/CTF regulations. So we took another look at our product and delivery suite to see how we can best serve them and came up with the ideal solution – out-of-the-box, pre-packaged applications”.

Norkom’s pre-packaged applications are specifically designed for small to medium sized financial services organisations. More standard in nature than the solutions offered to global tier one financial organisations and comprised of a smaller number of scenarios and limited amounts of configuration, Norkom’s out-of-the-box offerings provide these financial organisations with the capability to comply with the law.

Since its entry into Asia-Pacific in 2006, Norkom has experienced considerable success in the Australian financial crime and compliance marketplace, successfully on-boarding 10 clients such as ANZ, St.George and Bendigo Bank. In June 2008, the company announced record revenues to which its Asia Pacific operations contributed significantly. Norkom now has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Singapore to serve and support its expanding client base.

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