With a pair of recent alliances, the archiver eGistics Inc. is moving to make itself not only a manager of document images and data, but also a provider of services to help banks and other payment processors use their lockbox operations to help their corporate clients electronify and automate their receivables operations.
Robert E. Lund, eGistics' chairman and chief executive, said the approach, known as enterprise content management, is something of a shift for the Dallas company, which also offers workflow tools that allow customers to manage information in the archive.
"We are repositioning this company from a payment-centric model to a document-centric model," Mr. Lund said in an interview Monday. "I think we've got a new emerging market here."
eGistics announced an alliance Monday with US Dataworks Inc. of Sugar Land, Tex., a developer of payment processing software, to help billers and retailers streamline the management of remotely captured check images and data.
Terry Stepanik, the president of US Dataworks, said eGistics, which prices its services on a per-item basis, as does US Dataworks, had a compatible business model.
And while the big processors that use his company's ClearingWorks have their own archive, "we're looking at some smaller, middle-market prospects right now," Mr. Stepanik said in an interview Tuesday.
Also this month, eGistics said it would work with the electronic bill payment processor ChoicePay Inc., a unit of Tulsa National Bancshares Inc., to help payment processors and billers manage payments coming through multiple channels and to provide consolidated reporting.
Other financial companies are using their imaging capabilities to pursue broader markets. JPMorgan Chase & Co., for instance, introduced a service in March to help organizations manage their archived records online.
But where JPMorgan Treasury Services' DocManager Solutions has a relatively broad strategy for document management (its marquee customer is the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, which is storing memorabilia and historical documents in the archive), eGistics' approach still remains close to payment processing, Mr. Lund said. "We're not abandoning payments, not at all. We're very much expanding the offering."
Today, eGistics provides image retrieval and same-day payments decisioning for the retail lockbox processor Remitco LLC, a unit of First Data Corp.; an image and data archive for the core-account processor Fidelity National Information Services Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla.; and an archive for the wholesale lockbox operation of Union Bank of California, a unit of UnionBanCal Corp. of San Francisco. (UnionBanCal is mostly owned by Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc.)
As payments become more electronic, customers are going to demand more comprehensive services from their banks, Mr. Lund said. "It's going to be a competitive necessity to protect your treasury services business."
Aite Group LLC says most of the growth in remote deposit is going to be among smaller banks. Only 45% of banks with assets below $10 billion offer remote deposit, but 65% will do so by the end of 2009, the Boston research and advisory firm says.
Nancy Atkinson, a senior analyst with Aite, said that could play to eGistics' strengths as a hosted service. "That is something banks need to have. Once you capture that image, you have to store it for your clients."
But the archive also will need to keep pursuing alliances with others in the imaging business, she said. "It is incumbent on eGistics to partner with as many image converters as they can so they will have the data to store."
