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Advanced Retention Schedules & Legal Research for Financial Services Companies Now Available
Industry Retention Kit is an Accelerator to Modern, Accurate Retention Program
Mountain View, CA — August 23, 2007 — PSS Systems is pleased to make available a comprehensive industry retention kit for the financial services industry, including retention schedules and a library of legal citations to support the schedules. The kit is an excellent accelerator to a sophisticated, accurate retention program for all financial services companies, particularly given the commonality in records classes and applicable laws across the industry. The retention schedule set includes 288 classes of records typically found in global financial companies; each retention schedule reflects the specific laws that drive its retention period.
By providing this industry kit to all financial services companies, PSS Systems is advancing best practices in modern retention programs and eliminating costly, redundant efforts across companies with similar information categories operating in the same legal jurisdictions and under the same laws.
The schedules and legal research were developed at substantial expense by a leading law firm and Citigroup to modernize its retention program, ensure that its retention schedules reflected only the laws and regulations applicable to their industries and jurisdictions, and to enable a more sustainable model for retention management in its global program. The retention schedules are mapped to the specific legal citations that dictate retention requirements. Calculations done by Citigroup showed that this precision reduced the prior average retention period, in general, from almost 12 years to 3 years across their 288 classes of records – a significant and recurring savings for the company. Ironically, although the prior retention periods were longer, the prior “legal group” methodology made it more difficult to articulate the legal basis and defend retention period decisions.
“The traditional retention approach bloated retention periods with laws that did not apply to the financial services industry. In addition, the legal group categories and methodology obscured the relationship between law and retention decisions, so we invested in a complete, organic overhaul to look at our records and the laws across the U.S. that applied to our various businesses,” said a senior Citigroup Records Management official. “The result is a comprehensive records catalog that is both legally based and which has led to significant reductions in retention periods and instilled a greater confidence in our retention program. This master catalog of record codes based on law forms the backbone of our records management program on a global basis.” Because Citigroup participates in virtually every financial services market, the retention set includes the array of records classes applicable in the industry as well as the state and Federal laws that dictate retention periods.
With Atlas ERM and this set of industry-specific schedules and citations as a starting point, other financial services industries can:
- Have a sustainable retention program that is based on actual law and which provides immediate business value by reducing rather than adding cost
- Cut months or even years out of their program development by starting from the “best practice” working model in the industry. The simple review process allows it to be easily tailorable to individual firms or business units in the firm
- Legitimately reduce the average retention periods and the amount of data retained by linking retention rules to applicable laws
- Modernize the retention program beyond paper and physical warehouses to span electronic information, diverse business unit needs, and the disparate repositories of corporate information
- Allow records coordinators across the business to quickly conduct their own departmental inventories of records by selecting those that apply from the corporate "catalog" of record classes, document their local procedures for managing their records, and initiate changes and additions online for routing and approval by authorized legal reviewers or program managers
Companies should conduct their own internal review and approval of the schedules, and this process is greatly facilitated with Atlas ERM workflow and retention project management features. Atlas ERM software provides a cohesive enterprise system for retention policies and schedules across disparate systems, business units, and data so you can:
- Define policies and schedules globally, but manage and enforce them locally
- Manage records inventories and programs at a departmental or business unit level in concert with the corporate program
- Reconcile and effectively manage disparate retention schedules across geographies and business units
- Use a retention hub to define, approve, and communicate retention schedules to the many people and systems that must enforce them
- Update retention schedules in one place and enforce compliance with them in many places
- Be ready to describe your retention practices and sources of data with true confidence
Atlas ERM replaces binders of legal codes, static retention schedules on intranet sites, and the backlog of change requests submitted manually with a Web-based, dynamic system that easily manages the relationships between business groups and their records, laws and affected retention schedules, records and their locations as well as non-record lifecyles for a sustainable, living program.
As the sole distributor of the schedules and citation library, PSS Systems will provide annual update services for the citation library and the retention schedules through its relationship with Ryley Carlock & Applewhite. Ryley Carlock & Applewhite provides legal services to analyze and review client’s unique records environments and tailor the retention schedule set to the specific firm. The package works with the Atlas ERM software from PSS Systems and compliments Atlas LCC for litigation communications and collections.
For more information contact your PSS relationship manager or Haven Pell at: 650.810.8712 haven.pell@pss-systems.com.
About PSS Systems
PSS Systems started the legal holds and retention management software revolution in the early 2000s by envisioning the looming change in corporate legal requirements; its Atlas software suite reduces cost, burden, and risk for the world's leading corporations. Atlas LCC streamlines the legal holds and collection processes end to end, while Atlas ERM enables corporate retention programs across disparate business units, information sources, and systems. Today there are over 20,000 Atlas users worldwide and more than 25,000 legal matters actively managed in Atlas. PSS Systems continues to lead the industry through their unparalleled innovation and has become the thought leader on retention and preservation topics. It founded and sponsors the CGOC in January 2004, a professional practitioners community on retention and preservation. PSS Systems is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices throughout the United States including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. For more information visit http://www.pss-systems.com.
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PSS Systems and the PSS logo are registered trademarks, and Atlas LCC and Atlas Litigation Communications and Collections are trademarks of PSS Systems, Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
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