The maverick monthly newsletters OffshoreAlert and InsideBermuda, which have large readerships in Bermuda, have a new website at www.kycnews.

The newsletters were owned by Offshore Business News & Research, which has recently changed its name to KYC News Inc. KYC is used in the anti-money laundering field as a acronym for know your customer.

In a release to its subscribers, the newsletter editor, former Royal Gazette journalist David Marchant, said the site was devoted to news about financial crime, offshore finance and Bermuda's insurance market.

"We invite you to visit our new-look web-site, which has been substantially re-designed and improved to offer new products and services to our clients," he said. Subscribers to the monthly newsletters, OffshoreAlert and InsideBermuda, are now able to search the `pdf' file versions of the newsletter by keyword(s) via a search engine at the top of each page.

The company has also introduced a search engine for a new weekly due diligence newsletter, KYC Alert, which allows subscribers to search every edition, including documents such as lawsuits and criminal indictments, and view them at no extra charge.

The organisation said that it was now distributing information on a daily basis, as well as its weekly and monthly newsletters.

The site has daily news feeds to three separate pages on our web-site covering the following topics: `Financial Crime', `Offshore News' and `Bermuda News'.

On each of these three pages, there is a split screen, with the left-hand side containing our proprietary news feed and the right-hand side containing links to articles on third-party news web-sites.

Mr. Marchant said: "The changes to our site allow us to publish news about our coverage topics as it happens and are designed to complement our existing newsletter products, which will remain unchanged.

"We have increased the scope of our coverage to include news about financial crime committed in onshore centres, as well as our existing coverage of offshore finance and Bermuda insurance market.

"To reflect this expansion, we have changed the name of the company from Offshore Business News & Research Inc. to KYC News Inc., the term `KYC' standing for `Know Your Customer', which has become a synonym for `Due Diligence' in the financial world."