June 12, 2013 - Alacra, Inc., a leading provider of business information solutions for financial institutions and professional service firms announced the release of "The Periodic Table of FATCA Acronyms."

"With all the talk about getting ready for the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), we thought it might help everyone if we had a single resource for alphabet soup surrounding the new law," said Alacra CEO Steven Goldstein.

Financial institutions affected by FATCA are asking for the inclusion of FATCA client classification information in their onboarding workflow. Although the main FATCA challenge is in classifying existing customers (which may number in the tens or hundreds of thousands at some banks) classifying new customers at the time of onboarding is critical enhancement to the KYC workflow.

"With the deadline for IRS compliance approaching on January 1, 2014, there is still a great deal of confusion among financial institutions. We thought we would help organize the many terms being used to help our colleagues around the world," said Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra. "More and more customers are coming to us to request help adding FATCA identification processes to their Know Your Customer onboarding process. FATCA is just the latest requirement for identifying potential tax evaders at multinational financial institutions and similar laws are planned in Europe and Asia."

The Alacra team understands the difficult workflow decisions financial firms are facing with multiple jurisdictions, reporting requirements, and KYC initiatives. The Alacra Compliance team works closely with clients and the industry to help everyone make FATCA compliance robust and easy to add to existing processes.