Headlines:
Joint Venture to Use Peppercoin Suite Bisys Offers Check Exchange Service Fiserv Unit Using Alogent Software Regions to Expand Its Online Offerings
Joint Venture to Use Peppercoin Suite
SunTrust Merchant Services, a joint venture of SunTrust Banks Inc. and First Data Corp., has agreed to offer software from Peppercoin Inc. that aggregates low-value transactions into a single credit card payment.
The agreement, announced Tuesday, is the third between Peppercoin, of Waltham, Mass., and First Data or one of its joint ventures. Last month Peppercoin announced a similar agreement with Chase Merchant Services, a joint venture of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and First Data. On Feb. 2, Peppercoin said that First Data had agreed to offer the aggregation software through merchant acquirer customers.
The Small Transaction Suite software is designed for micropayments, which Peppercoin defines as $5 or less.
With the boom in online sales of low-cost digital files, such as music, games, movies, and cell phone ringtones, merchants are interested in using aggregation software to make card payments for these items less expensive. But some merchants have complained that the standard credit card interchange fees are too high to make low-value card transactions profitable.
Peppercoin's software also works for point of sale transactions, and merchants can use it to sell items by subscription or invoice as well.
Last week Peppercoin announced that the developers of Mashboxx, a still-in-development music download Web site, have agreed to use the software.
Bisys Offers Check Exchange Service
Bisys Group Inc. has begun offering a check-image exchange service that connect its customer banks with a variety of clearing and settlement systems.
"I believe we are the only vendor today that can enable our client banks to send electronically to multiple applications," Mark Ryan, an executive vice president at the New York financial outsourcer and the general manager of its Bisys Document Solutions unit, said in an interview last week.
The service, called ISCheck 2005, lets banks send and receive image files and handles both forward presentment and returns, he said. It provides a graphical interface for users and supports remote image capture at various types of sites, including branches, corporate sites, and automated teller machines.
Bisys began providing image-based check clearing through the Federal Reserve system about a month ago, Mr. Ryan said. For the last four months Bisys has also been using the Endpoint Exchange image clearing network operated by Metavante Corp., the technology subsidiary of Marshall & Ilsley Corp. of Milwaukee. For the last nine months, Bisys has been letting banks settle directly with each other, using a bilateral exchange agreement.
ISCheck 2005 supports all three types of exchanges, Mr. Ryan said.
Bisys provides outsourced item processing for 405 banks, mostly small ones, and for a number of service bureaus, Mr. Ryan said. In all, more than 1,000 banks, thrifts, and credit unions use Bisys' image processing, he said.
Fiserv Unit Using Alogent Software
Information Technology Inc. a Lincoln, Neb., subsidiary of Fiserv Inc., plans to integrate deposit-automation software from Alogent Corp. into its Premier brand of core-processing software.
ITI, which announced the agreement Tuesday, said Alogent's image-based check processing software, Sierra Xpedite, will be made available this year to its customer base, which includes more than 2,800 financial institutions.
ITI said it is adapting the Atlanta vendor's deposit-automation software - including Sierra Xpedite and Sierra Xchange - for use at teller windows, branch back offices, and corporate customers' sites.
Regions to Expand Its Online Offerings
After a major acquisition last summer and a conversion of its online banking system last fall, Regions Financial Corp. plans to start offering several new online banking tools this year.
Michael F. Jackson, the $84.1 billion-asset Birmingham, Ala., company's president of alternative delivery, said it will offer an online check imaging feature for retail customers this month and a specialized system for small-business banking by midyear.
"We're going to move faster now with features that really count for the customer," he said.
Both the consumer and business banking applications are based on technology from S1 Corp. of Atlanta, which makes Internet banking, branch, and call center software. Regions became one of S1's first banking customers in 1996, when it outsourced its online banking to S1's data center. In October, Regions took its online banking system in house and started using the current version of S1's system.
Mr. Jackson said in an interview Thursday that running the software in-house gives Regions more control, and adding an application for business banking will give his company more flexibility in serving small businesses.
Regions acquired Union Planters Corp. of Memphis in July and plans to convert Union Planters customers to its own online banking system, Mr. Jackson said. The three-stage conversion is scheduled to begin in April and finish this year. Union Planters operated in eight southern and midwestern states.
Ross McKay, the vice president of product management at S1, said the Regions project validates his technology's "ability to scale" to handle larger online banking systems. S1's flagship product line is its Enterprise suite of interrelated modules, each of which is designed to work either alone, or in conjunction with other modules.
Regions helped S1 develop the Enterprise platform, and by installing the basic banking software, Regions could easily add some of S1's other banking software modules, Mr. McKay said. "They've got the platform. They can reuse the interfaces. They can add other parts of the platform over time."
