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Minnesota Technology Magazine - Winter 2007

Up Front

4 Questions

Jay Levine helps financial institutions around the world stay on top of the ever-shifting regulatory landscape.

—Suzy Frisch
Photograph by Sara Jorde.

Jay Levine, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services

Jay Levine joined Minneapolis-based Wolters Kluwer Financial Services just as it was making its presence known in Minnesota.As the company’s chief technology officer and vice president of product development, he has helped lead the information services and publishing business through a period of rapid expansion.Financial services companies are turning to the firm for its compliance software, analytics, and documentation solutions that help them keep on top of all the latest regulations.

1. In a nutshell,what does Wolters Kluwer Financial Services do? It is a multinational information publishing business, with half of its assets in the United States and half in Europe.We are the financial services division,and our division is a conglomerate of several mediumsized businesses that were brought together in 2003. One was Bankers Systems in St.Cloud,another was PCi Corp.in Boston. We provide compliance solutions for financial services companies—banks, securities, insurance, and [companies in] the mortgage industry—anyone who lends money or takes deposits of any kind.

2. Compliance has been a hot topic of late.Do you work on Sarbanes-Oxley and other similar regulations? No.We provide solutions for financial institutions to make sure they are complying with the rules when they provide customers with a loan. Do they follow fair lending practices? Are banks following the rules on who they loan to and different parts of the community? Are they disclosing the right terms and conditions when they give you a consumer loan or home equity loan? The stakes are enormous for businesses. There are cases of national institutions getting $50 million to $70 million penalties for not properly disclosing to customers the nature of the transaction. So we help them manage that risk.

3. How do you keep up with all the changes in regulations on the state, federal, and local level? We have an intellectual property staff of 70 attorneys and compliance analysts in Minnesota, and their job is to monitor all jurisdictions for changes and make sure our products offer the right solutions for customers. We do proactive releases and software updates three times a year for the various statutory changes that go on.

4. How has your company grown so rapidly? We have done some acquisitions in the past two years, and our business is growing organically, too.The reality is that we’re the beneficiary of a highly regulated society. Also, the mortgage and consumer lending industries are very healthy.We have the nice problem of serving customers with a wide variety of products.We’ve put out some world-class products such as Expere,which is a solution for national financial institutions that allows them to integrate all of their compliance software into their enterprise IP environments.