A recent acquisition and an ongoing customer conversion project helped drive up CheckFree Corp.’s earnings in its fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31.
The Norcross, Ga., online bill payment vendor said its net income jumped 142% from a year earlier, to $37.7 million. Revenue rose 20%, to $226.9 million.
“Over all, I’m clearly pleased with our execution in the third quarter and throughout this year,” Pete Kight, CheckFree’s chairman and chief executive, said Tuesday in a conference call with analysts.
The number of transactions processed in the company’s electronic commerce division, which includes online bill payment operations, rose 8% from the previous quarter, to 293.3 million.
CheckFree raised its full-year earnings guidance to a range of $1.34 to $1.37 a share, from a range of $1.19 to $1.24. For the current quarter, it expects to report revenue of $226 million to $231 million and earnings of 30 to 33 cents a share.
Mr. Kight said that PhoneCharge Inc., the phone and online bill payment service provider that CheckFree bought for $99.8 million in January, increased the division’s transactions and revenue, though he did not say by how much.
The division also got a last-minute boost from the long-awaited conversion of Wachovia Corp.’s online bill payment customers.
“Wachovia converted nearly half of its legacy consumers to CheckFree during the last week of the third quarter, and we expect the full migration to be complete in mid-May,” Mr. Kight said.
