We support the Department of Treasury’s FinCEN in the continued fight against financial crime
The challenge:
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) needed continued support for a number of its critical applications and systems. This project supports more than 70 individual systems used by more than 4,000 users to provide timely and accurate analysis of financial transactional data surrounding anti-money laundering and terrorist financing activities. Technatomy was brought aboard to assist in the full-scale development support of these important systems, many of which are legacy systems.
The challenge with this effort is the nature of FinCEN: a fast-paced environment where data is constantly gathered, collected, and reviewed. System downtime for maintenance and updates is not an option.
Our approach:
This multi-vendor, multi-system environment required an unusual approach to management. At project kick-off, we met with all of the system vendors and their government partners to establish a baseline for support. Once established, we started regular meetings of the system teams, requiring regular reporting on system development/ maintenance status. Our staff interfaces with application and system architecture vendors and provides transition services from development and testing phases into full lifecycle production. This activity includes reviewing and recommending changes to lifecycle documentation that is developed under the modernization effort and identifying critical components such as backup methods and data archival methodologies to be included into the modernization efforts. The result is a smoothly operating FinCEN Data Center and Network Operations Center, where information on status and reporting is easily available.
As part of our active support, we maintain all systems, regardless of the base operating system, and ensure their availability in accordance with the government-required assessments on individual systems. In an effort to make system updates more easily available, we coordinate with vendors to allow FinCEN the ability to automatically update its systems from central update servers proactively, rather than have support workers identify the updates and download them. Technatomy also coordinates with the IT Security division of FinCEN to scan systems to proactively detect any vulnerability and provide remediation plans for any anomalies found.