Puerto Rico will become the first jurisdiction in the United States to adopt a single technological platform for financial reporting, Governor Jenniffer González Colón announced on Thursday at La Fortaleza alongside Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCIF) Commissioner Mónica Rodríguez Villa and Association of Banks of Puerto Rico president and CEO Zoimé Álvarez Rubio. The system, called FIRE (Financial Reporting System), cost $1.4 million in state capital funds, was built by Puerto Rican firm V2A Consulting over about a year, and was selected through an RFP process with seven firms.
It goes live on November 1 and consolidates five older OCIF platforms, mostly from providers DBI Financial Systems and guajaSoft Inc., used by banks, private equity funds, pawnshops, casinos, international financial entities and investment companies to file reports. One system dated to 1993 and could not be updated, Rodríguez Villa said. Álvarez Rubio noted commercial banks previously filed 52 separate reports to OCIF, in addition to filings with the FDIC and the Federal Reserve.
FIRE will launch with 10 years of statistical data, and OCIF supervises more than 3,200 institutions under 22 license types. Rodríguez Villa said nearly 21 international entities have been liquidated or closed, adding 'the house was cleaned,' though more work remains. González Colón also noted Puerto Rico left the US Treasury’s money-laundering-prone jurisdictions list in March.