Despite the troubles facing the banking industry, Fiserv Inc. says it's business as usual.
In fact, if there were a wave of failures, the Brookfield, Wis., technology company might even stand to benefit, because there is a good chance its bank clients would gain accounts, Jeffery W. Yabuki, its president and chief executive, said on an earnings call Tuesday.
There is a significant difference between the "brick and mortar" of a financial company and the "accounts and transactions" it contains, Mr. Yabuki said. "We could have accounts switching from institution to institution, but on balance I believe that the net wins will overtake any losses that we would have."
Fiserv also announced that it had a deal to provide core processing for Omaha Financial Holdings, the banking division of Mutual of Omaha Insurance Co.
The insurance company entered the banking market last year, and has acquired three banking companies since May of that year. In the past week it added the deposits of two banks regulators closed over the weekend: the $3.4 billion-asset First National Bank of Nevada in Reno and the $250 million-asset First Heritage Bank in Newport Beach, Calif.
Mr. Yabuki said Mutual of Omaha plans to move all of its accounts to Fiserv's CBS Worldwide core platform.
He acknowledged that the credit crisis is having an effect on his company. "We're seeing pressure on discretionary technology license spending among large investment banks and financial institutions."
But the pressure creates an opportunity to sell services to larger companies than Fiserv has historically served, Mr. Yabuki said. "We're in numerous conversations with large institutions to ... to help them reduce costs."
Fiserv gained a sales force that focuses on the top 200 banks when it acquired the Atlanta online bill payment and software firm CheckFree Corp. in December.
In the first quarter his company extended a contract with Bank of America Corp. through 2013. B of A had been rumored to be mulling bringing some of its online bill payment operations in-house.
Fiserv is beginning to achieve some success in cross-selling among CheckFree and Fiserv clients, he said. Fiserv has sold bill payment to nearly 290 clients this year.
Mr. Yabuki also said his company, the nation's largest third-party check processor, agreed to handle some check processing for a top 10 bank, which he did not name.
He also said that Fiserv plans to introduce an online banking and bill payment service, CheckFree Online Advantage, this year, combining CheckFree's bill payment service with a hosted version of Corillian Corp.'s online banking software. (CheckFree acquired Corillian in May of last year.)
Fiserv said Wednesday that Umpqua Holdings Corp. would use the new service. Umpqua has used CheckFree services for seven years and a Fiserv core processing application since 1990.
In the second quarter, Fiserv's net income fell 8.3% from a year earlier, to $99 million, on higher operating expenses and interest costs from the CheckFree deal. Revenue grew 38%, to $1.3 billion.
Earnings per share from continuing operations grew 17 cents, to 83 cents, beating the average Wall Street estimate by 4 cents. The adjusted internal revenue growth rate for the quarter was 2%, and Fiserv said it still expects to post full-year adjusted earnings of $3.28 to $3.40 a share from continuing operations.
Tien-Tsin Huang, an analyst at JPMorgan Securities Inc., wrote in a note Wednesday that the results were "pretty clean," and that the macro-level discussion was comforting.
"The only blemish was a downtick in internal growth guidance," he wrote.
