Headlines:
E-Trade Wins Award for Online Bank Site Expense Savings Lift Carreker Out of Red U.S. Bank Operating Government Lockbox
E-Trade Wins Award for Online Bank Site
E-Trade Financial Corp. of New York won a Webby Award for its online banking site.
The awards, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, honor excellence in Web design, creativity, usability, and functionality.
"Paying bills, possibly pleasurably - extraordinary," said Robert Shenk, E-Trade's vice president for retail banking, in accepting the prize Monday at the Webby ceremony in New York. (Acceptance speeches are limited to five words.)
The other nominees in the banking and bill pay category were ING Group NV's INGdirect.com, FedEx Corp., Bank of the West, and Pay By Touch Networks Inc., which makes biometric point-of-sale products.
Most of the Webby Awards are voted on by academy members, who include the musician David Bowie, the namesake of the now-defunct bowiebanc.com. (ING won the People's Voice award, which is voted on by visitors to the Webby site.)
Expense Savings Lift Carreker Out of Red
Carreker Corp., reported a profit Tuesday for its fiscal first quarter, which ended April 30, and said it offset a revenue drop with cost cuts.
John D. "Denny" Carreker, the Dallas bank technology software vendor's chairman and chief executive, acknowledged that it had lost sales to competitors in the first round of investment in check imaging, but he expressed confidence that new products would put his company back on a growth track.
Carreker earned $498,000, or 2 cents a share, in the quarter, compared with a loss of $812,000, or 3 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue fell 5%, to $28.2 million.
"There was a window in '04 that we missed," Mr. Carreker said during a conference call with analysts. "We're cautiously optimistic about our 2005 prospects, because we are better positioned than we were at the first of the year."
During the quarter Carreker began offering software to manage automated teller machine networks and to guard against the double-posting of image replacement documents.
It also formed alliances with International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., and ID Analytics Inc. of San Diego to combat fraud, and with the New York financial outsourcer Bisys Group Inc. for payments consulting.
Creative Payments Solutions, a unit of BB&T Corp., licensed Carreker software for low-volume remote capture of check images, which the Winston-Salem, N.C., banking company plans to remarket to businesses and community banks.
Carreker said it expects stronger revenue and operating income this quarter and higher revenue for the year, but it did not offer detailed projections.
Though some banks are settling some paper checks through image exchange networks, demand for image technology has yet to take off, which has been a blow to Carreker's earnings.
U.S. Bank Operating Government Lockbox
U.S. Bancorp is providing wholesale lockbox technology for individual payments to the government.
Steve Soroka, the executive vice president for corporate services at U.S. Bank, said in an interview Tuesday that the Minneapolis company is processing payments and collecting remitter data for a federal agency.
U.S. Bancorp is not allowed to name the customer, Mr. Soroka said, but the project involved "unique and complex requirements" and processing personal payments.
His company licensed software for the project from Vicor Inc. The Richmond, Calif., image technology vendor said Monday that U.S. Bancorp is using the wholesale lockbox-processing component of its receivables information delivery system.
The installation, at U.S. Bank's southern California operations center, became fully operational May 31, Vicor said.
Mr. Soroka said the project was U.S. Bank's first with Vicor, which was chosen because its software "solved a specific business need." The vendor was able to deliver a highly automated system on a tight implementation schedule to meet U.S. Bank's obligation, he said.
A wholesale lockbox for business-to-business transactions typically involves higher-value payments and more complex remittance documents than retail lockboxes, which usually match a single payment coupon with a check for the same amount.
U.S. Bank, a top 10 lockbox provider by item volume, operates 14 centers in its 24-state region, Mr. Soroka said. It has been a lockbox provider to the U.S. government since 1987.
