Cooperative Services, Inc. is offering a program from Fidelity National Information Systems, Inc. (formerly Certegy Card Services) called Patriot Guard, a comprehensive solution to assist financial institutions to comply with Section 326 of the USA Patriot Act. This section of the Patriot Act is vitally important to your credit union and compliance will become mandatory October 1, 2003.

In summary, Section 326 requires that financial institutions:

1) establish formal Customer Identification Program (CIP)
2) verify the identity of any person seeking to open an account;
3) maintain records of the information used to verify the person's identity
4) determine whether the person appears on any lists of known or suspected terrorists or terrorist organizations.

Patriot Guard provides financial institutions of all sizes with an all-inclusive framework for developing and administering a Customer Identification Program (CIP), documentation and record keeping requirements, data storage and retrieval. Fidelity National Information Systems' Patriot Guard team will work closely with these institutions to implement an overall strategy to comply with the new requirements, and to provide ongoing compliance support. Patriot Guard can also be used by credit unions to comply with Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) regulations and reduce the risk of identity theft when opening new accounts. The program's features include:

• User friendly, Web-based design
• Secure, password protected access and user name origination tracking
• Unlimited OFAC screening at no extra cost
• Analysis of 64 separate databases containing 17 billion aggregate records
• Real-time or batch mode access
• Nightly system updates
• An effective tool to combat identity theft

Through your relationship with CSI, we are able to offer special shared site pricing to institutions of less than $50 million in assets to make this a more affordable program.

Although compliance is not mandatory until October, we recommend you get started. Implementation of any program will require an educated decision on vendor, finalizing your CIP and training your staff appropriately. CSI and Fidelity National Information Systems, Inc. are here to help with Patriot Guard!

All compliance solutions for the Patriot Act are not the same. Click here for a list of questions you should ask providers.