Bank One Corp.'s alliance with Microsoft Corp. has produced a suite of cash management software and banking services, Integrated Cash Management Solutions, that the companies announced Wednesday.
Technology industry analysts called the suite useful but somewhat narrow. It automates the process that middle-market companies use to send and receive files among computers running Microsoft Great Plains accounting software and Bank One's online cash management service.
Kathleen Nugent, a senior vice president and the head of product development in global treasury services at Bank One, estimated that 1,800 of its cash management customers use Microsoft Great Plains software.
"One of the goals of the program is … to sell to each other's customers, which is another big population for us," Ms. Nugent said in an interview Wednesday.
The product suite is one of only a handful that the companies have introduced as a result of their 2-year-old alliance. Bank One and Microsoft said in December 2001 that they had signed a three-year deal worth $30 million to conduct joint product development and marketing.
So far there have been few hints that the deal produced much.
- In April of last year the companies introduced a consumer product for Internet banking called Bank One MoneyManager, which combined features of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer, with its Money personal financial management software and Bank One's online banking service. It used Microsoft account aggregation technology to draw financial information from numerous sources so customers could see updated account information on a Bank One Web site.Ms. Nugent said Wednesday that MoneyManager has been terminated by mutual agreement. She called it "very experimental."
- In September of last year the companies introduced card-based purchasing and travel and entertainment offerings designed for small and middle-market companies. It aimed to help them manage spending more effectively by linking data from Bank One commercial card transactions to Great Plains' back-office products.
- In April they introduced a related product, Bank One Direct PayChek Card, a stored-value card that allows an employer to establish a payroll card account and funding it with the employee's salary.
The cash management product introduced Wednesday includes such features as check outsourcing, a positive-pay service for check fraud detection, electronic payables and receivables, and automated lockbox reporting for incoming payments."It brings STP - straight-through processing - to a consumable and affordable level for small and midsize businesses," said Maggie Scarborough, a senior analyst at the Financial Insights Inc. unit of the Framingham, Mass., research firm International Data Corp. "This is a good start, certainly a splashy start for middle-market STP."
Still, she noted, "Great Plains is not the only game in town." Midsize companies use a wide range of software, including general-purpose accounting packages such as Great Plains, and industry-specific "enterprise resource planning" systems that are customized to meet the needs of law firms, for instance, or hospitality companies.
