Remember that seemingly infinite ream of papers you signed to get your mortgage? There’s a company that creates most of those papers and ensures that they follow equally voluminous rules and regulations—and that company is now headquartered in Minnesota.
Minneapolis-based Wolters Kluwer Financial Services is a unit of Wolters Kluwer, an Amsterdam-based firm that develops and markets compliance software, reference books, and other information products for the health care, financial services, tax and accounting, legal, and education industries.
Though its name might suggest that the company provides money-management services, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ bread and butter is in helping financial companies comply with their own guidelines and follow the rules created by local, state, and federal government. The company tracks more than 30,000 pieces of legislation as well as news from government agencies to keep on top of the changing rules that affect its client companies.
“What makes us different from a document-delivery or software company is the level of our expertise,” says Brian Longe, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ president and CEO, who has been with the company since early 2005.
Wolters Kluwer itself originally operated as a holding company. In 2003, it decided to group the companies it owns by industry and turn each group into an operating unit. The biggest company in its financial-compliance group was St. Cloud–based Bankers System, which the Dutch entity acquired in 1999. Wolters Kluwer Financial Services launched in January 2006, opening its headquarters in Minneapolis in order to be in the same state as Bankers System and several major financial companies, including Wolters Kluwer client U.S. Bancorp.
For some clients, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services provides documents and forms, and makes sure that they are filled out correctly. For other customers, it supplies software that allows them to generate compliant documents, databases that help them follow changing laws and regulations, and consultants that help clients become and stay compliant.
Wolters Kluwer Financial Services also provides proprietary software platforms with embedded compliance features that perform a variety of industry- and client-specific functions. Its PCi product, for example, strips data from mortgage transactions to determine whether a bank is in compliance with federal lending and fair-housing rules. Another product is GainsKeeper, which helps tax and financial professionals, as well as individual investors, calculate capital gains and identify potential tax consequences before an investment is sold. Other programs identify suspicious bank-deposit patterns, or help investment firms file required documents with such institutions as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Longe says that his firm’s clients include at least 80 percent of U.S. banks, as well as 70 percent of top mortgage originators. The company is growing rapidly. Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ Minneapolis staff increased from 25 to 100 employees between 2005 and 2006. (The company’s total head count is around 1,200, spread across nine offices.) Much of its recent growth is due to numerous acquisitions, including its purchase of Mississippi-based GulfPak, which provided similar services, late last year. In February, it acquired Desert Document Services, an Arizona firm that provides automated document preparation applications for the mortgage industry.
