Fidelity Information Services Inc. of Little Rock, the big technology arm of the title insurer Fidelity National Financial Inc., has agreed to begin reselling software from Oracle Corp. this year.
The software in the deal, announced Tuesday, is E-Business Suite, a package of financial and corporate performance management applications. Lynn Williams, a product strategist at Fidelity Information, said it will offer the package to its customers in a version that will work with its own core banking and financial management software.
Oracle, of Redwood City, Calif., said it hopes to make more such deals with outsource providers of core processing to financial companies. "There will be others after Fidelity," said Andrea Klein, Oracle's vice president of services, industries, strategy and marketing. "This was not a one-off."
Oracle is talking to about 25 companies here and abroad about selling its products and integrating them with their own, Ms. Klein said. Meanwhile, she said, it is about to sign its first customer through Fidelity.
E-Business Suite will add accounts payable, fixed assets, and Internet expense features to the general ledger system in Fidelity Information's software. The software would retain the Oracle brand. Fidelity Information will offer to host it for its customers.
Ms. Williams said it teamed up with Oracle in response to "customers' request for a next-generation financial management system." Fidelity already offers similar software but with fewer features and will continue to support it, she said. "Those solutions might be the right solutions to new customers."
The two companies made the agreement this month, Ms. Williams said. Exactly when a Fidelity-compatible version of E-Business Suite will be ready has not been decided, she said.
Another provider of outsourcing services to banks, COCC Inc. of Avon, Conn., has offered E-Business Suite since 2000. Seventy-four of its 120 core processing customers use the product, said Matthew L'Heureux, its financial application manager, but 90% buy when offered it. "There will be a time when we get to 119 of 120," he said.
Jeanne Capachin, a research director at the Framingham, Mass., research firm Financial Insights Inc., a unit of International Data Group Inc., said the Fidelity deal is "brilliant for Oracle" because it will enable it to sell to small banks.
"Oracle has been pretty successful, but there are only so many large banks," Ms. Capachin said. Most small ones would consider E-Business Suite beyond their reach, she said - they "are looking for packaged solutions; they wouldn't have wanted to make the integration effort" on their own.
But Ms. Capachin said small banks might hesitate to use Oracle's software even with help from a company like Fidelity Information.
Replacing their entire general ledger system, as they would have to do to use E-Business Suite, can be complicated even if the new one has been integrated into a larger application, she said.
Alenka Grealish, who manages the banking group at the Boston market research firm Celent Communications LLC, said a partnership was the best way for Oracle to sell to the financial services industry.
"To really tap the vertical markets - in this case, financial services - they need to team up with other behemoths," Ms. Grealish said.
