E-mail, First

In spite of all the attention the World Wide Web is receiving, e-mail is the workhorse of the internet. If you're using the internet, you probably have an e-mail address. There's also a good chance you aren't using it to potential!

Most supervisory agency personnel now have e-mail addresses. So do many of your vendors and trade association contacts. Even a growing number of bankers are wired for e-mail. E-mail is a fast and efficient way to communicate with all of them AND you can send attachments AND you can save copies of messages for future reference (similar to snail-mail) AND e-mail is free (unlike overnight delivery.) Mailing lists can serve you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By placing your e-mail address on such a list, you will receive an e-mail every time the list operator has information to send out. Airlines and other merchants use these kinds of lists to promote hot deals. The compliance manager will also want to register with the law firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson to receive "Alerts" via e-mail. See http://www.ffhsj.com/bancmail/sobanc.htm for more information. CAUTION: before subscribing to any mailing list, be sure you know the procedure to get OFF the list if you change your mind.

E-mail messages can also retrieve information from remote servers. The St. Louis Fed offers such a service called "FTP Mail." (See http://www.stls.frb.org/fred/ftpmail/ftpmail.html for details.) With FTP Mail, you e-mail a message telling the Fed's "FRED" database which files to send and it handles your responds automatically. If you're doing Reg. Z "program" or "preapplication" disclosures, you'll be interested in FRED's "WGS#YR" files containing histories for commonly used interest rate indexes.

Copyright © 1997 Compliance Action. Originally appeared in Compliance Action, Vol. 2, No. 5, 4/97