Bank of Boston Switches to Intranet System For Automated Clearing House

NEW ORLEANS - Bank of Boston Corp. announced this week that it has agreed to license Intranet Inc.'s new automated clearing house processing software.

The system, called Continuous ACH Environment, or Cache, supports so- called continuous flow processing for the clearings and settlements of automated clearing house transactions.

The deal, whose terms were not disclosed, was announced Tuesday at the National Automated Clearing House Association's annual conference, held here.

"We need a system designed to handle multicurrency systems and a continuous flow processing environment," said Theodore M. Mertz, director of cash management with the bank. "We felt it met our needs, and our capacity will be increased dramatically."

With the development of Cache and the sale to Bank of Boston, Intranet has entered into territory dominated by Servantis Systems Inc.'s Paperless Entry Processing family of products.

Officials said the new system will provide an architecture that will anticipate future cross-border ACH payments, a system the clearing house group is now attempting to develop.

New initiatives in cross-border ACH payments are rapidly unfolding. Nacha's Cross Border Council is getting ready to vote on operating rules for ACH payments with Mexico and Canada, and a consortium of European banks has agreed to a set of standards for ACH payments.

Tony Smith, president of Newton, Mass.-based Intranet, said that Cache can help banks expand in cross-border ACH payments because it is not dependent on a Nacha format and it is able to support a "large number of direct send relationships" that do not have to go through a central clearing house.

Intranet has also sold Cache to First Chicago Corp. for the collection of corporate tax returns.

The Intranet system at Bank of Boston will replace the bank's Paperless Entry Processing system by Servantis.

The $44.6 billion-asset bank originated over 21 million ACH transactions in 1994, a 22% jump from the previous year. It plans to be in limited production by the end of the year.

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