Centerprise Targets Corporate Governance with New AccountabilityCenter Software Solution.

Business Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 24, 2002

Centerprise Services Inc.:

Launches Joint Marketing Solution with IBM in London to Address New

FSA Regulations

Centerprise Services Inc. announced today the introduction of AccountabilityCenter(TM), a fully comprehensive, corporate accountability solution that is part of their CenterSphere(TM) enterprise management system for the financial markets.

The AccountabilityCenter solution is a response to new Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulations, which demand that firms maintain clear and appropriate apportionment of significant responsibilities among their directors and senior managers as to who has what responsibilities. They must also maintain historical records, such as organization charts and job descriptions, ensuring that the responsibility and accountability of each individual line manager is clearly established and understood. Additionally, confusing reporting lines, authorization levels and job descriptions and responsibilities must be avoided.

"We're entering a new era in corporate governance and accountability," says Reto Tuffli, CEO at Centerprise. "AccountabilityCenter is a cost-effective, enterprise-wide solution that's been designed by capital markets professionals for financial services professionals to improve, strengthen and provide compliance to their corporate governance process."

AccountabilityCenter offers a systematic approach to formalizing employee responsibilities and accountabilities, dynamically linking them with actual behavior through workflow and business process management. "What do your firm's past and current organizational and legal entity systems look like? What workflow processes are in place to fully comply with corporate policies and regulatory requirements? What committees and project teams are in place, including who their members are and what their roles and responsibilities are within the firm? These are some of the core issues being addressed," says Jonathan Pruett, Centerprise's global head of sales and marketing.

AccountabilityCenter is being jointly marketed and implemented with IBM (NYSE: IBM), which is in line with IBM's continued focus on operational resilience. Simon Wilson, EMEA alliances manager for IBM's Global Financial Markets, says, "CenterSphere is at the core of IBM's operational risk offering and through CenterSphere provides a true enterprise management solution for financial services organizations."

Centerprise's Tuffli adds, "Our business partnership with IBM provides access to their global network of infrastructure and integration support services, which is essential to successfully launching AccountabilityCenter."

Key features of Centerprise's corporate accountability solution include:

- The ability to explicitly document and systematically maintain sets of important responsibilities, such as those between administrative and back-office support staff and front-office units, and to formally assign client and trading account responsibilities.

- Support for the maintenance of a firm's organizational structures, including "matrix management" structures and more complex reporting lines.

- The ability to define group structures, e.g., the Board of Directors, committees and project teams.

- Historical state maintenance for all key data types so that any moment in the past can be accurately recreated, including information on people, roles, responsibilities and organizational structures.

About Centerprise

Centerprise is a technology solutions software and services company that offers a broad, integrated, yet modular enterprise management system developed specifically for the financial services industry and, in particular, for the wholesale capital markets sector. Their product suite, CenterSphere, designed from the ground up to facilitate the management and control of the financial enterprise, integrates all the key managerial disciplines into a single framework, achieving a new level of cost efficiency for the enterprise not previously possible.

At the same time, the framework is flexible and components can be implemented incrementally as needed. They include: organization and accountability management, portfolio (position) management, financial reporting (general ledger), enterprise-wide workflow process, market risk, credit risk and operational risk management, analytics, daily trading P&L reporting and attribution, customer relationship management, human resources, legal and compliance, audit management, market and enterprise data and application integration management. CenterSphere is the first enterprise system built specifically for the requirements of capital market organizations by capital market veterans. For more information, visit www.centerprise.com.