Sensitive Information Management Suite

Comerica Insurance Group Invests in Cyber-Ark's Inter-Business Vault® to Enable and Deliver New Banking Services to its Corporate Customers

Comerica Incorporated (NYSE: CMA) is a financial services company headquartered in Dallas, Texas and is among the 20 largest U.S. banking companies with total assets of $67.5 billion as of December 31, 2008. Comerica has been a Cyber-Ark customer since 2003 and continues to expand its use of Cyber-Ark's Inter-Business Vault® in order to drive revenues through the delivery of innovative new services for small-to-midsize business customers using highly secure, Managed File Transfer solution.

THE CHALLENGE

Cyber-Ark works primarily with Comerica's Business Bank segment that provides companies of all sizes with a number of credit and non-credit financial products and services, ranging from account transaction processing and reconciliation services to receivables processing. Before digital transfer and storage technology was available, many of the banking and treasury management services Comerica provided to customers were highly manual, requiring significant time and physical resources. This approach restricted Comerica's ability to scale its business and create new competitive advantages.

In order to expand the number of services Comerica could deliver to customers while addressing increasingly complex compliance and operations requirements, Comerica needed a more secure, automated and operationally efficient approach to handling Cash Letter processing, Account Reconcilement Processes (ARP), Automated Clearing House (ACH) transactions, and Lockbox files. At a minimum, this would require transforming these files into digital assets in order to transfer, process and store them.

However, at that time, exchanging digital files was a challenge that required customers to develop in-house expertise around technology such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and/or invest in expensive solutions that small-tomidsize corporate customers couldn't always justify. Even with the in-house expertise and expensive systems, many businesses weren't guaranteed the security of electronically transferred files, and processes could not be governed properly. Comerica turned to Cyber- Ark to help eliminate the need for expensive, time-consuming communications technologies and difficult to architect securely while alleviating automatic and manual transactions.

Today, with increasing competition in the banking business and economic pressures facing corporate customers, Comerica must develop new, value-added services to better enable their customers' businesses. One of Comerica's goals is to deliver these new services rapidly and without being required to make new infrastructure investments or endure lengthy security reviews. As adoption of file transfer technology continues to increase, Comerica must be able to support demand for new services and ensure they can handle increasing volumes of data transfers.

THE SOLUTION

Cyber-Ark's Inter-Business Vault provides a fully governed business-to-business Managed File Transfer solution that enables financial service organizations like Comerica to handle the secure and governed exchange of business information, such as check images, payment processing, clearing processing, and other sensitive data transferred between business partners, service providers and customers.

"To combat current economic challenges, our team is responsible for helping to generate revenues by developing innovative fee-based services. Any new corporate service we can dream up can be achieved through the Inter- Business Vault - without having to stress the resources of the IT team," said Arthur Neef, VP Treasury Management, Corporate Product Advisory Group, Comerica Bank.

More than 1,600 corporate customers utilize Comerica-branded, Inter-Business Vault based processes for secure data exchange over the Internet, processing thousands of files per day. The Inter-Business Vault easily scales to meet increasing file transfer volumes and demand for new Comerica services. Specifically, the Inter-Business Vault is capable of enabling new business and customer services by automating the transfer of financial data such as payroll, payments and other automated transaction reports, while improving overall services and SLAs. The solution also improves productivity and cost-effectiveness for organizations by streamlining processes with business partners and other service providers. From compliance, audit and security aspect, the solution provides full governance capabilities.