NICE Acquisition Adds Real-Time Transaction and Interaction Analytics Solutions

RA'ANANA, Israel -- Speech analytics solutions provider NICE Systems will acquire Actimize, a provider of software solutions for anti-money laundering, brokerage compliance, customer due diligence, and fraud prevention for the financial services industry, for $280 million. Actimize will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary following completion of the transaction, with its current management team remaining in place. 

The integration of Actimize into NICE will allow for real-time transaction and interaction analytics. Whether a customer calls a financial contact center, accesses the enterprise Web site, corresponds through email, or makes an ATM withdrawal, the combination of NICE and Actimize will enable financial institutions and enterprises to receive real-time alerts on compliance, fraud, and other anomalies.

This combined solution “constitutes a technology breakthrough in processing, analyzing, and cross-referencing information from customer transactions and interactions,” says Haim Shani, CEO of NICE. “This is the only combination in the world, which for the first time will be able to take millions and millions of transactions and interactions, and handle huge masses of data, comprising a full view of the customer touch points with the organization."

NICE captures and analyzes hundreds of millions of voice, Web, email, and other interactions daily for banks, brokerages, and other financial institutions worldwide. Actimize solutions analyze nearly 1 billion transactions daily at the world's top banks and brokerage firms.  
“We come from a transaction point of view,” says Amir Orad, Actimize’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. “NICE looks at client interactions, not internal transactions within a bank’s systems. It’s a pretty big difference. This is not one company buying an identical product from the other, but a very complimentary set of solutions that do anti-fraud compliance solutions in different areas and at different levels within the same institution.”  

Despite the revolutionary nature of this conflation, Orad does not anticipate any growing pains. “We’ve been working as partners for more than a year,” he adds. “I don’t foresee any technical or marketing problems.”

NICE and Actimize will focus initially on the financial services industry with plans to leverage this combination for additional national security applications. Furthermore, NICE plans to expand its business through its acquisition to provide a more complete, comprehensive and accurate picture of customer behavior in other verticals within the enterprise and security markets, addressing additional critical issues such as customer loyalty and retention, and market intelligence.