06/23/2008

Appian, an global provider of business process management (BPM) technology, announced today that AGF Trust has launched its Imaging and Workflow System built on the Appian Enterprise Suite. AGF Trust is a wholly owned subsidiary of AGF Management Limited, one of Canada's premier investment management companies (TSX: AGF.B).

ebizQ received the following:

The full Appian-based solution encompasses more than 120 process models covering six product lines, and crossing numerous functional groups including Client Services, Finance, Funding Teams, Ongoing Administration, and Underwriting. This initial launch completes Phase One of AGF Trust’s strategic BPM rollout.

AGF Trust's Appian-based Imaging and Workflow System is designed to collect incoming client documents and trigger corresponding business processes for loan origination or ongoing administration. The system includes integration with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to store and route documents within Appian Enterprise, targeted process-to-process messaging to trigger specific actions based on the receipt of documents, and the conversion of more than 650,000 historical documents from AGF Trust's legacy system into Appian for collaboration. In addition to automating tasks, Appian is helping AGF Trust streamline and increase structure over highly human-centric, mission-critical credit fulfillment and credit servicing processes.

John Bennett, Executive Vice President at AGF, said, “We selected Appian as our BPM partner to gain better control and more efficiency from key business processes, improve compliance initiatives, and support our efforts at continuous process improvements. We are excited to go live with the initial phase of our BPM initiative.”

Appian Enterprise is the first comprehensive BPM suite to offer integrated process, knowledge, and analytics capabilities. Industry research firm Forrester named Appian a financial services market leader in its August 2007 "Forrester Wave™: Human-Centric BPMS for Banking and Investments, Q3 2007." In the report, Forrester noted Appian’s "human-centric BPMS capabilities and deep pre-built processes for banks and investment firms" helped the company establish its position as a leader with banking and investments organizations. The report also states that Appian "excels in compliance with a separate compliance manager tool to support the needs of FSIs [financial services institutions]….Appian offers strong FI [financial institution] leadership and expertise. Other strengths include a very solid interface framework with a three-tiered approach to interfacing with common banking and investment applications. Finally, Appian has built cross-channel capabilities that specifically enable visibility across all channels and support the idea of a single enterprise process, configurable by channel and LOB [line of business]."

"Our success with AGF Trust is a testament to Appian's position as the BPM leader for financial services institutions," said Matthew Calkins, President and CEO of Appian. "Appian Enterprise offers a powerful and flexible foundation to meet the current and future needs of financial services industry leaders, and we look forward to working together to extend the value of BPM throughout all levels of AGF Trust’s business."