Servantis, Prodigy in Marketing Pact for Home Banking

Servantis Systems Inc. has announced a home banking partnership with Prodigy Services Co.

The cooperative marketing deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, would help banks use Prodigy, the popular on-line service, to deliver home banking services.

"Most banks have a strategy to offer home banking via different methods," said a spokeswoman for Norcross, Ga.-based Servantis, "and this alliance enables them to hit the on-line services."

The Prodigy-Servantis agreement is a natural extension of a deal last year between MasterCard International and Servantis, which integrated the card association's MasterBanking electronic banking products with Servantis' processing capabilities.

MasterCard's home banking platform already supports Prodigy.

A. Christian Fredrick, MasterCard senior vice president responsible for the MasterBanking program, called the Servantis alliance with Prodigy a "positive development and an enhancement to our programs."

Word of the Prodigy/Servantis alliance came about a month after bill payment processor Checkfree Corp., Columbus, Ohio, unveiled plans to acquire Servantis.

The acquisition would restore a link between MasterCard and Checkfree that had ended last year.

Checkfree's purchase of Servantis, which is expected to close this month, will allow Checkfree to add PC banking and automated clearing house services to its electronic commerce offerings.

Through a combination of electronic bill payment transactions and remote banking, Servantis and Checkfree will serve about 300 financial institutions.

Checkfree also has relationships with Fiserv Inc., Electronic Data Systems Corp., and Automatic Data Processing.

Servantis, formerly known as Stockholder Systems Inc., is owned primarily by the venture capital firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe.

New customers for Servantis technology include PNC Bank Corp., Meridian Bancorp, Frost National Bank, Midlantic Corp., and National City Corp.

Servantis, which provides home banking and payment processing services, has also allied itself with Alltel Information Services Inc., Little Rock, Ark., a major outsourcing company with more than 500 banking clients.

Ms. Tucker is a freelance writer based in Hazlet, N.J.

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