Headlines:
Mellon Rolling Out Lockbox Upgrade Jack Henry Buys Fingerprint ID Firm Barclays Uses Cyota Phishing Fighter
Mellon Rolling Out Lockbox Upgrade
Mellon Financial Corp. has upgraded its flagship wholesale lockbox operation in Pittsburgh by installing expanded image and alert capabilities and automated encoding of check amounts.
The Mellon Global Cash Management unit plans to introduce a similar upgrade next month at its Chicago lockbox, then at its other five locations around the nation.
Robert W. Stasik, an executive vice president at Mellon and the head of Global Cash Management, said in an interview last week that the upgrade in Pittsburgh was completed in August. "It's actually being done in multiple phases" - installing new software, training staff, and establishing new workflow processes.
The image-based system, which uses integraPay technology from the Data Management Products Inc. unit of First National of Nebraska Inc., enables automated processing of checks using courtesy amount recognition and legal amount recognition.
The upgrade will give Mellon's corporate clients better information about their accounts receivable, including remittance information and posting to their own computer systems, he said.
It also will help Mellon serve other banks that outsource their lockbox operations to the Pittsburgh company, Mr. Stasik said. For instance, it can encode checks for deposit on behalf of the other banks' clients without having to change hardware.
Jack Henry Buys Fingerprint ID Firm
Continuing its diversification drive, Jack Henry & Associates Inc. has acquired a biometrics company that could bring it into markets other than financial services.
The acquisition for Verinex Technologies Inc. of Lake Forest, Calif., closed last week. Jack Henry did not say how much it paid.
"Our focus will be financial, but there are a number of opportunities out there," said Jack Prim, the chief executive officer of the Monett, Mo., company, best known as a vendor of core banking software for processing deposit and loan transactions. Verinex "offers nontraditional products and, for us, some nontraditional customers that we now have some access to."
Under the Biodentify brand, Verinex makes software that use fingerprint recognition to provide physical security, authenticate users on a computer system, provide a single sign-on to multiple software applications, lock out unauthorized users, and administer other security features. Its primary customer base is in the health care industry.
Jack Henry has been expanding into new markets through acquisition. In April it bought e-ClassicSystems Inc., a Norwood, Mass., provider of management software for automated teller machines. Last month it bought Banc Insurance Services Inc., a Holyoke, Mass., company that provides outsourced insurance agency services.
Last week Jack Henry said it had bought Select Payment Processing Inc., a provider of automated clearing house processing services.
Barclays Uses Cyota Phishing Fighter
Barclays PLC of London is using a service from Cyota Inc. of New York to fight e-mail fraud.
The FraudAction service alerts bank customers when fraudulent e-mails are sent out using the bank's name, and contacts Internet service providers to shut down e-mail accounts and Web sites used in such "phishing" attacks.
Stuart Mackenzie, a fraud senior portfolio manager at Barclays, said last week in a press release that it was "extremely pleased" with the results of a pilot test and "decided to continue working with Cyota and use FraudAction as a full-production service as part of our efforts to fight phishing and mitigate its effects."
The service is being used in the Barclays Bank and Barclaycard operations. Cyota said three other top-tier banks also use the service, but only Barclays has announced that it is doing so.
