Fidelity National Financial Inc. said Wednesday it had acquired two companies that will allow it to sell proprietary check imaging software for the first time.
BankWare Inc., which develops the software, and Pro-Soft Inc., which resells it, have been combined to form the BankWare division of Fidelity's Integrated Financial Solutions unit.
Fidelity would not say how much it paid.
Gary Norcross, the unit's president, said the BankWare acquisition is its first in which the seller has retained its name, though companies purchased by other Fidelity units have retained their names.
"BankWare has very nice name recognition in the industry today," he said. "We didn't want to inhibit them artificially through a name change."
Robert Hunt, a senior analyst at the Needham, Mass., research firm TowerGroup, said the BankWare acquisition was a good one for Fidelity, "because BankWare is a relatively small company with a good product."
Bob Darty, a BankWare principal, said its deal with Fidelity would remove some of the limitations his company faced as a result of its size. "A lot of institutions are just reluctant to do business with a smaller company."
Fidelity sells third-party imaging software from Advanced Financial Solutions Inc. of Oklahoma City. Mr. Norcross said his company did not do business with BankWare before the deal, but "a lot of our customers were already using BankWare" products.
AFS software will still be available to those who use it currently, and to new customers who request it, but Fidelity will offer BankWare's software to new clients, Mr. Norcross said.
In announcing the deals, Fidelity spotlighted one of BankWare's products, its ImageCentre software, which Mr. Norcross said is already available to Fidelity customers.
Last year BankWare, of Birmingham, Ala., generated $25 million of revenue and $5 million of net profit. Like past acquisitions, it "fits very naturally -- it was a product gap in our offering," he said.
Mr. Hunt said that gap has "pretty much" been filled through the BankWare deal.
According to Mr. Darty, "One of the first things on our agenda would be to tightly integrate" BankWare's software "with Fidelity's core products."
Mr. Norcross said Pro-Soft, of Harrisburg, Pa., was purchased primarily to maintain its ties with BankWare. "Their primary function was reselling the ImageCentre software in the Northeast."
Fidelity has made numerous acquisition deals over the past year to enter markets and acquire products and services. In May it announced a deal for Hamilton & Sullivan Ltd., and in September it purchased WebTone Technologies Inc.
In December it announced the purchase of Customized Database Systems Inc., and a month later it announced a deal for Sanchez Computer Associates. Before the BankWare and Pro-Soft acquisitions, its most recent deal was the February purchase of Aurum Technologies Inc., which has been integrated with IFS.
These deals, among others, gave Fidelity specialists and products in customer relationship management, online banking, and loan syndication, and access to new core processing markets.
