Corillian Corp. has won its second contract in a month in rival S1 Corp.'s backyard - a global licensing agreement with Citigroup Inc.
Citi will use the Beaverton, Ore., company's Open Financial Exchange (OFX) technology for Internet banking services.
The win is significant because Citigroup is an investor in Atlanta-based S1 and uses S1 technology for e-Citi, its Internet banking and broker channel. But the selection of Corillian "was not a reflection of any change in our relationship with S1," said Don Eichenseer, director of global on-line banking at e-Citi.
Last month Wachovia Corp., also an early investor in S1 and a user of its Internet banking software, licensed and started testing such software from Corillian.
OFX is a data exchange specification used by the financial services industry to standardize the way consumers use the Internet for transactions such as paying bills, transferring balances, and getting statements. Consumers can conduct OFX transactions through popular financial management programs such as Intuit's Quicken and Microsoft's Money.
Citigroup will use Corillian's Voyager eFinance Suite to provide access to OFX transactions for people using e-Citi's Direct Access banking channel.
S1 provides OFX support on its servers only to financial companies using its consumer and retail banking suites. Charles Ogilvie, S1's general manager, said that because OFX is a commodity product, "we don't sell it separately."
However, customers that want just OFX support from S1 can get it through a recent partnership with Sybase Inc., a data base software company in Emeryville, Calif. S1 can use Sybase's OFX server for such customers.
Mr. Eichenseer of e-Citi said it had been looking for an OFX server provider for three months. Using Corillian will "enable us to easily add OFX transaction capability to our Direct Access system around the world," he said. The Direct Access platform is used in 12 countries.
Citi's relationship with Corillian is nonexclusive because Citi wants to provide as many choices as possible to its customers, Mr. Eichenseer said.
Corillian's Voyager was the first OFX-certified server in the market and has been successfully installed at many financial institutions, including SunTrust Bank of Atlanta, Wachovia Corp. of Winston-Salem, N.C., Hibernia National Bank of New Orleans, and Sanwa Bank of Los Angeles.
In 1997, Citicorp was one of six prominent financial companies that invested a total of $14 million in Security First Network Bank of Atlanta. Royal Bank of Canada bought the on-line bank a year later.
The remaining, independent technology unit was then named Security First Technologies, and later renamed S1 Corp.
