Smart Investigate 4.1 Released
October 15, 2004

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Pegasystems provides rules-based exception processing applications for retail banking, wholesale banking, and card issuers and acquirers. With the release of Smart Investigate 4.1, Pegasystems now offers its entire suite of 'smart' exception processing applications on the PegaRULES Process Commander platform, which enables large companies to rapidly respond to changing business conditions by modifying and creating automated decision rules and processes.

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Pegasystems has released PegaBANKING Smart Investigate 4.1 on the new PegaRULES Process Commander (PRPC) platform. The PRPC foundation gives Smart Investigate enterprise scalability, enabling it to act as a single exception processing solution across departments and products at large financial institutions.

Smart Investigate is designed to increase operational efficiency and productivity, reducing the cost of processing an investigation by an average of 60%. Utilizing business rules, the application also reduces the risk resulting from inconsistent adherence to company policies. Line-of-business managers can control and change automated processes in Smart Investigate that enforce the organization's policies, while driving differentiated service to build stronger ties with the bank's most valued customers.

The latest version of Smart Investigate automates investigation and exception processing for wholesale banks with greater intelligence and flexibility, enabling banks to cut costs by processing more transactions automatically and reducing manual costs and errors. The application serves departments throughout the wholesale bank, including payments, treasury, securities, nostro reconciliation and other areas, allowing banks to utilize one solution across business lines.

"We've constantly refined Smart Investigate over its long and successful history, but this might be our biggest advance yet," said Pegasystems CEO Alan Trefler. "Smart Investigate's increased intelligence and flexibility allow banks to control investigation automation at an enterprise level while maintaining all the specialization required by individual departments. Smart Investigate further improves on the deep expertise in financial services exception management that has made Pegasystems an industry leader."

Smart Investigate offers a host of new features to improve the quality and efficiency of exception handling processes, including:

* Automated parsing of free-text messages for evaluating and routing free-text messages such as e-mails, SWIFT MTn99 messages and FedService messages. Smart Investigate identifies key phrases in free-text messages, extracts information such as amounts and dates, automatically creates and populates cases and initiates the appropriate resolution procedures. Banks can further customize the parsing function in order to continuously increase their rates of straight through processing (STP) of inbound messages.

* Rules-based guided processing that takes users step-by-step through the entire process of researching and resolving complex exception cases. Guided processing enables banks to enforce consistent exception handling, eliminating the uneven quality permitted by systems that force users to hunt for information without clearly delineated processes. This capability also minimizes training time for new staff and allows investigators to switch between groups as necessary, because specific case handling knowledge is now encapsulated in the system, rather than required of the user.

* Customer self-service and integration with existing customer service systems. Financial institutions can embed Smart Investigate in any Web-based application from corporate self-service Websites to customer service at branch offices and correspondent banks, with role-appropriate slices of functionality offered to each type of user. Smart Investigate can also integrate with banks' existing customer relationship management (CRM) and customer service applications to provide service through those applications' user interfaces, using web services standards. Pegasystems customers have reduced incoming inquiry volumes by as much as 85% by offering self-service options such as transaction searches, inquiry initiation and status updates on existing cases.