News Releases

KU School of Business Professor Finds Commercial Interest in Software

Rajendra Srivastava, Ernst & Young Professor and Director, CARAT

Rajendra Srivastava, Ernst & Young Professor and Director, CARAT

Thursday, September 11, 2008

AdvanSoft International, Inc., a software firm headquartered in the Chicago area, has entered into a licensing agreement with the University of Kansas for online technology that accesses and analyzes the financial reports of publicly traded companies.

FRAANK technology was developed at the KU School of Business by Rajendra Srivastava, the Ernst & Young Distinguished Professor of Business and director of the Ernst & Young Center for Auditing Research and Advanced Technology (CARAT). The software can be programmed to prepare risk assessment models, credit worthiness reports, and other documents based on public records. End users include financial and credit analysts, regulators, banks, auditors, and companies making acquisition decisions.

FRAANK stands for Financial Reporting and Auditing Agent with Net Knowledge. According to Srivastava, there is no technology comparable to FRAANK on the market today.

"Researchers and other decision makers across business will benefit from this technology," Srivastava said. "I'm excited that AdvanSoft will develop and market products using technology that originated at KU."

AdvanSoft plans to build a portfolio of tools around the FRAANK technology, bundling it with different software products used by industry professionals, while also creating a live stream service to present customers.

"Using our commercial market penetration and software development team, we hope to make it the tool for all money/hedge fund managers, financial analysts, quantitative researchers, academics and corporations," said Anil Sunkara, CEO of AdvanSoft.

FRAANK retrieves company information filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, such as Form 10-K and Form 10-Q, and tags it for analysis. This also eliminates the risk of error when data is re-keyed.

"Users can access this information anywhere at any time," said Jim Baxendale, director of Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property at KU. "They can develop interactive models, such as 'if-then' scenarios, and industry-specific profiles of financial performance for benchmarking a given company."

More information about FRAANK is available at http://www.eycarat.ku.edu/.


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