Headlines:
Intuit Buys Card Processor Innovative Md.'s Provident Sold on Scheduling Tool Comerica Picks Software from Fla.'s Fidelity
Intuit Buys Card Processor Innovative
Intuit Inc.said on Monday that it had completed its acquisition of Innovative Merchant Solutions, a Calabasas, Calif., processor of credit and debit card transactions.
The acquisition, for up to about $116 million in cash, closed on Saturday, and almost quadrupled Intuit's small-business payment processing revenue. The Mountain View maker of QuickBooks and TurboTax software had announced the agreement on Sept. 2.
Innovative's 110 employees are staying on, and Joe Kaplan, its chief executive, who also helped found it in 1999, remains in charge.
Steve Bennett, Intuit's president and chief executive officer, said that Innovative's services would integrate tightly with the QuickBooks small-business accounting program.
In an interview on Monday, Holly Anderson, an Intuit spokeswoman, could not say when that integration would be available. "We're focused now on getting everything integrated," she said.
Intuit had $9 million of merchant account services sales last year. Innovative had $25 million of revenue that year. It serves 50,000 merchant customers nationwide and brings Intuit new products and capabilities, including point-of-sale equipment and PIN debit transaction processing.
Md.'s Provident Sold on Scheduling Tool
Provident Bank of Maryland is expanding the use of scheduling software beyond the teller line to include the sales and service platform in branches.
For several months it has been using the software from Demos Solutions of Norwell, Mass., to predict customer traffic and schedule tellers in its traditional branches in Baltimore, its home market, said William B. Henderson, a vice president in the community banking division of the bank.
Beginning this month it will use the software to develop staffing models for the platform side at the Baltimore branches. With that information, managers might begin rebalancing staffing levels, but Mr. Henderson would not make any forecasts.
"There's not a master plan at this time, because we don't know what we're going to discover on the platform side," he said in an interview last week. The data might not be in until early next year. "It's a phased approach. There's no rush."
A year ago, before he approached executives at Provident's parent company, the $5.1 billion-asset Provident Bancshares Corp., about getting a scheduling tool, the bank did not have a business approach to staffing requirements in branches, he said.
"Now we know what those [requirements] are," he said.
Working with consultants from Demos, Provident analyzed the time it took to execute different kinds of transactions, customer waiting times, and other factors. When that process was completed in April, it began using the software to analyze teller staffing patterns.
Though some branches were found to be understaffed, it turned out that more were scheduling more tellers than were usually needed, Mr. Henderson said.
Comerica Picks Software from Fla.'s Fidelity
Comerica Bank has licensed sales software from Fidelity National Financial Inc. of Jacksonville.
The Detroit bank's branch and call center representatives, small-business lenders, and private bankers will use Fidelity's TouchPoint Sales, which helps manage relationships, originate accounts, and identify, track, and close sales across channels.
Michael S. Lawson, a senior vice president of retail operations for the banking unit of the $58.7 billion-asset Comerica Inc., said it plans to have the software installed on its network next year, initially for pilot projects and then for full deployment later in 2004, though he said he did not have a firm schedule.
Comerica has had sales measurement and incentive plans in effect since the mid-1990s, "and we've seen some terrific results," he said in an interview Sept. 24. "But there's only so much you can do with limited technology and with paper."
The contract, which was announced on Sept. 22, is Fidelity's first for TouchPoint since it bought the software's developer, WebTone Technologies Inc. of Charlotte, on Sept. 2.
Mr. Lawson said that Comerica had been talking with WebTone and nearly 20 other vendors for 18 months after putting out a formal request for proposals.
This was Comerica's second purchase of TouchPoint software. It licensed a referral tracking system from WebTone last year, to which the sales system will link.
