Headlines:
Oracle Raises Bid for PeopleSoft Fidelity National Gets OK on InterCept Wachovia Adds ARC to Lockbox Services PayPal Waives Some Web and Debit Fees N.J.'s Fundtech Has a Deal for CashTech Sovereign Extends Fiserv Servicing Pact Alliance-Leicester Signs for S1 Hosting Official Payments Extends Va. Pact Intrieve, Zions Have Clearing Agreement
Oracle Raises Bid for PeopleSoft
Oracle Corp. has increased its hostile bid for the rival software firm PeopleSoft Inc., to $24 a share.
Jeff Henley, Oracle's chairman, said Monday during a teleconference that PeopleSoft's board is the "only obstacle" to a deal now that European antitrust regulators have approved it and U.S. regulators have been blocked from challenging it.
Mr. Henley called the new offer a "tremendous price" and said it was time for PeopleSoft shareholders to act. Oracle said the bid would be withdrawn if a majority of PeopleSoft shares are not tendered by Nov. 19.
Oracle, which supplies database software to large organizations and businesses, has a lot of financial services clients. The Redwood Shores, Calif., company has received heated resistance from PeopleSoft, of Pleasanton, Calif., since the initial takeover bid was announced last year.
The initial bid was $16 a share.
Fidelity National Gets OK on InterCept
Fidelity National Financial Inc.'s pending acquisition of InterCept Inc. received antitrust clearance last week.
InterCept, an Atlanta outsourcer of data processing services to community banks, said Friday that it had received early termination of the waiting periods required by the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act. It also reaffirmed that a shareholders meeting to vote on the deal, valued at $408.2 million, is scheduled for Nov. 8.
Fidelity National, of Jackson-ville, Fla., announced in Sep-tember that it was buying InterCept, which has been plagued by troubled acquisitions, disgruntled shareholders, and an aborted plan to go private last year.
Fidelity has said it expects to complete the purchase by Nov. 15.
Wachovia Adds ARC to Lockbox Services
Wachovia Corp. of Charlotte has begun offering accounts receivable conversion capabilities to retail lockbox customers.
The service, announced last week, allows treasury services customers to convert paper checks into automated clearing house payments at the lockbox, either in-house or through Wachovia's retail operations.
ARC has become one of the fastest-growing payment options in the history of the ACH system. Nacha, the electronic payments association, has predicted that a billion checks will be converted into ACH transactions this year.
The ARC format is faster and cheaper for banks to settle than paper checks.
"Whether our customers process their remittances in-house or with Wachovia through our nationwide retail lockbox network, we can provide the appropriate ARC service," said Jean Kochick, a vice president with Wachovia, in a press release.
PayPal Waives Some Web and Debit Fees
PayPal Inc. has waived some of its fees as an apology for a recent service blackout that affected both the Web payment service and its PayPal debit cards.
The San Jose payments subsidiary of the online auction giant eBay Inc. said it will refund transaction fees incurred Oct. 28; credits will appear by Nov. 25.
The waiver applies only to transaction fees, but there is no limit on the dollar amount of the credit.
Several countries are excluded from the promotion, including Germany, France and the United Kingdom - the only three besides the United States with country-specific PayPal sites.
A PayPal spokeswoman said users of those sites, which were also affected by the outage, would receive a different offer over the next few weeks. Germany and the United Kingdom are No. 2 and No. 3 in eBay usage, after the United States.
The outage, from Oct. 8 through Oct. 14, began when a software upgrade went awry. eBay said that the upgrade functioned during tests but the system was later overwhelmed by peak traffic.
PayPal processed 83.4 million transactions in the third quarter. It has 56.7 million customer accounts, 17.4 million of which were used in the quarter.
N.J.'s Fundtech Has a Deal for CashTech
Fundtech Ltd. in Jersey City announced one acquisition deal and closed another last week.
The payment software vendor said it is buying CashTech Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. for $3.3 million ($2.9 million immediately and $400,000 when the transaction closes, which is expected within two weeks). As much as $3.7 million more could be due within three years if CashTech reaches certain performance goals, Fundtech said Thursday.
CashTech, which is based in India and has an office in Chicago, develops cash management software for banks and has more than 50 clients in Asia.
George Ravich, Fundtech's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, said CashTech's product, which is designed for banks seeking a modular product that can be tweaked to fit existing payments systems, would fill a gap in Fundtech's lineup.
The software would be a good fit for European and large U.S. banks and would give Fundtech its first "foothold in Asia," Mr. Ravich said.
Fundtech also said it had acquired Datasphere, a Swiss company that provides interbank clearing and settlement systems for 90 European banks. The purchase doubled Fundtech's business there with banks that move funds using Swift (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication).
Also last week, FundTech reported that third-quarter earnings rose 18% from a year earlier, to $14.2 million. Net income surged 187%, to $710,000. It expects to post full-year revenue of $55 million, and Mr. Ravich said he expects its annual revenue to reach $100 million within three years.
Fundtech has more than 700 bank customers using its payment engine systems, including Citigroup Inc., which is centralizing its worldwide payments system at a single New Jersey site running Fundtech software.
Sovereign Extends Fiserv Servicing Pact
Sovereign Bancorp Inc. of Philadelphia has extended by five years an agreement to use Fiserv Inc.'s MortgageServ system for loan servicing.
The banking company, which has used MortgageServ for nine years, also decided this year to switch to Fiserv's UniFi Pro Mortgage eX loan origination software, Fiserv said in a press release last week. Both products are offered by its Fiserv Lending Solutions division.
Fiserv, of Brookfield, Wis., also announced that the mortgage lending unit of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. of Columbus, Ohio, had linked its UniFi Pro and MortgageServ systems for real-time integration and lower operating costs.
Nationwide Advantage Mortgage Co. has used UniFi Pro for more than 10 years. It is converting to the new UniFi Pro Mortgage eX, an extensible version that permits more integration with third-party computer programs.
Alliance-Leicester Signs for S1 Hosting
S1 Corp. of Atlanta will host the online business banking operations of the $91 billion-asset Alliance and Leicester PLC of Leicester, U.K.
The company's Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank will replace several applications with S1's Corporate Banking International software. The unit has 250,000 business clients of all sizes and hopes to offer more online banking services.
Jamie Ellertson, S1's chief executive, called the agreement an important endorsement of its efforts to expand into Europe.
Official Payments Extends Va. Pact
The Commonwealth of Virginia has extended by two years an agreement with Official Payments Corp. that lets Virginia businesses and individuals pay a variety of taxes and fees electronically.
The subsidiary of Tier Technologies Inc. of Reston announced the extension last week.
Official Payments offers electronic payment processing for 24 states, the Internal Revenue Service, and the District of Columbia. The service lets people can use a credit card to make payments online or over the phone; the customer pays a processing fee.
Intrieve, Zions Have Clearing Agreement
Zions Bancorp. has agreed to clear digital check images for customers of the Cincinnati outsourcing provider Intrieve Inc.
Technology provided by Zions' NetDeposit Inc. is used to convert checks into images. They are then transmitted to the Salt Lake City bank, which acts as a correspondent bank for Intrieve's customers through its electronic cash letter clearing service.
The software can also determine whether a check can be settled as a image, should be converted into an automated clearing house payment, or must be printed and settled as an image replacement document.
The two companies said last week that the partnership will help Intrieve's clients settle transactions faster, increase efficiencies, and reduce fraud.
