Press Releases
Cloud-Based Audit Security Service Confirmation.com Sees Rapid Bank Adoption in 2014
22 Aug 2014 - 3 minutes read
Last Updated: 08/22/2014
NASHVILLE, TN – August 22, 2014 – Confirmation.com, the most-used cloud-based fraud detection and efficiency software for financial audits, is pleased to announce it has tripled the number of banks that have adopted its platform in the past year, a sign the company’s value proposition to clients is quickly taking hold in the banking industry.
Confirmation.com’s services, processing more than $1 trillion in confirmation information annually for a majority of public companies, as well as private companies, nonprofits and government agencies, are now used by more than 700 banks in 60 countries, including most recently South Africa, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia.
The bank growth is in addition to 12,000 accounting firms in 100 countries who are signed up for the service via the company’s U.S. and London offices and through its reseller partners around the world.
“We have handled more confirmations in the past 12 months than in the first eight years of business,” said Confirmation.com Senior Vice President Dave Malone, “with triple digit growth internationally this past year.”
Confirmation.com's founder and President Brian Fox attributed the rapid adoption of Confirmation.com to the efficiency it brings to the audit process. "The market is self-educated, learning best practices from its own members," he observed. "By taking confirmations out of the postal system and putting them securely online, we cut the response time to an account confirmation request from weeks to hours, while ensuring that only people authorized to get these requests actually do."
Confirmation frauds occur when the leaders of a company being audited are able to inject false information about their revenue, cash balances or receivables into the audit system, such as with false contact information for their banks or customers. Once successful, these frauds can persist for years and even decades, running up billions of dollars in theft and investor losses. Some of the most prominent confirmation frauds are HealthSouth and PFGBest in the United States, Parmalat in Italy, Satyam in India, Olympus Cameras in Japan and Sino-Forest in China.
Confirmation.com was founded by Brian Fox in 2000, when he was at Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management, as a way to digitally replace the conventional paper-based confirmation process. He saw that process as not only inefficient but also easily subject to fraud.
The company expanded rapidly when four Top 10 banks began requiring its use for all confirmation requests starting in 2008.
Today, Confirmation.com’s multi-patented processes validate the authenticity and authorization of each user for 100,000 auditors and those responding to confirmation requests.