Quest, the major electronic banking system m Kentucky, has agreed to combine with Electronic Payment Services Inc's. Money Access Service, better known as MAC.
The Louisville-based network will bring to MAC, by some measures the nation's largest regional system, 950 automated teller machines, 1.7 million cardholders, 42 merchant processing clients, and 429 point of sale terminals. Quest serves Indiana and Tennessee as well as its home state.
MAC currently has about 15,000 AT-Ms and 110,000 point of sale terminals.
Officials involved in the Quest-MAC deal said it is not technically a merger, but they declined to give the terms of the transaction. Like previous ATM network deals, it was driven by large member institutions' desire to reduce their number of network affiliations.
Quest executives were not available for comment, although president Michael E. McEvoy noted in a statement that Quest and MAC are already linked through some common owners and member institutions.
Two of Quest's seven owners - Banc One Corp. and PNC Bank Corp. - own stakes in Wilmington, Del.-based Electronic Payment Services, and a third - Cleveland's National City Corp. - is slated to take an ownership position. Yet another Quest owner, Louisville's Liberty National Bancorp, recently joined MAC as a participant.
By October, Quest's ATM and point of sale terminals will all accept bank-issued MAC cards.
Quest is expected to move its processing to MAC from Midwest Payment Systems, a unit of Cincinnati's Fifth Third Bancorp. by June 1995. At that time, MAC 1ogos will replace Quest's on the terminals.
MAC executives said processing traffic from Quest will likely be handled by the network's Cleveland data center, though it is possible that the Wilmington site would also handle portions of the processing.
MAC president John R. Beran said Quest cardholders will have access to ATM and point of sale terminals in 32 states.
Asked if the Quest deal carried any potential antitrust implications for Electronic Payment Services, Mr. Beran suggested that the Justice Department would not look too hard at the combination because of the way it was structured.
"There is really no [Justice] issue, because there is no arrangement, if you will, other than that the board of Quest has voted unanimously to terminate its operation and migrate its processing into Money Access Service," Mr. Beran said.
