13 Infiteq Launched to be a Complete

Carreker-Antinori, Fiserv, National Processing Co., UPS Worldwide Logistics partnership

To remain competitive, banks are often forced to offer a host of services to their corporate customers that they cannot do efficiently themselves.Cash management is no exception. "Often, cash-management services are not money-makers for a bank," says Steve Ward, svp of Fiserv, Inc. The obvious solution is to outsource those services. "Outsourcing continues to be explosive," says George Logemann, director of outsourcing consulting for The Yankee Group. "It's more than a quarter of a trillion dollar market in the United States, and it's growing by about 20 percent each year."

The headache for banks, particularly in the cash management area, is that they end up having to outsource different service components to several firms because no one outsourcer can do it all. But this hurdle fell last March when a new company called Infiteq was formed to help banks consolidate their cash management services. Infiteq will combine the cash management services of four existing companies: Carreker-Antinori, Fiserv, National Processing Co. and UPS Worldwide Logistics. "The good news is that it will help create a one-stop shop for services," says Logemann. The possible downside, he says, is "the challenge of balancing how the individual companies are rewarded in the marketplace versus how they are rewarded as being part of the new alliance."

Partners in the new company say the venture will encourage banks to use existing technological capabilities of the four partners-such as image archiving or electronic check presentment-without forcing banks to invest in the infrastructures required to maintain those technologies. "Many banks are looking at how to be part of the electronic age without investing in the cost-intensive technology to do it on their own," says David Zoo, evp of National Processing Co. "What we're offering to banks is the option to let us be the manufacturing and technology end of financial services," says John Carreker, managing director of Carreker-Antinori, "and let them be the distributors." M.Dahir