Headlines:
Fidelity National Offers Cross-Sell Service PassMark Security Hires a Chief Executive Music Kiosk Operator to Use Peppercoin B of A Picks SunGard Software for Basel II
Fidelity National Offers Cross-Sell Service
Fidelity National Information Services Inc. is offering a cross-selling service to lenders that use its mortgage servicing package.
The service, from the start-up XSell LLC, is housed at Fidelity's operations center and ties into the computer systems at lenders' call centers to enable operators to make customized offers.
Bruce Andrews, a senior vice president at Fidelity, said a lender could offer its own products, such as home equity loans, or others', such as insurance.
The XSell service runs information about the lenders' customers through an algorithm that figures out which sales pitch "has the highest potential for meeting the need of the borrower," Mr. Andrews said.
Fidelity, which is majority owned by Fidelity National Financial Inc., said EverBank Financial Corp.'s EverHome Mortgage is using the XSell system. Mr. Andrews said that a second lender, which he would not name, is also using it, and that several are implementing it. More than 80 financial institutions use Fidelity's shared platform to service more than 26 million mortgages.
Rob Lee, XSell's chief executive, founded it in 2003 after Fidelity entered the mortgage processing business by buying his employer, Alltel Information Services Inc. Fidelity National, XSell, and EverBank are all based in Jacksonville, Fla.
PassMark Security Hires a Chief Executive
The authentication software vendor PassMark Security Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif., has hired Lin Johnstone as its chief executive.
Ms. Johnstone was most recently a consultant to a venture capital company and the interim CEO at some of the companies in which it had investments. Earlier she had been the CEO of two technology companies, Evolve Software Inc. of San Francisco and Industrie Matematik International of Stockholm.
At PassMark she has taken over from Bill Harris, its chairman and co-founder, who has been the acting CEO. The appointment was announced Tuesday.
PassMark introduced its image-based security software in 2004 but has been growing rapidly since Bank of America Corp. said last May that it would use the software for all of its more than 13 million online banking customers. That rollout is nearly complete.
PassMark said that more than 20 financial companies are using its technology to authenticate more than 10 million customers in three countries.
People using PassMark's software must enroll at their banks' Web sites by selecting an image. When they log in, the Web site displays that image to verify that the site is not a fake created by criminals to trick people into revealing personal information that could be used to steal their identity.
PassMark's software also places a file on users' computers; when they log in, the software looks for the file to verify the customers' identity.
Music Kiosk Operator to Use Peppercoin
Synergy Media Group Inc., a Denver provider of in-store digital music kiosks, has agreed to use micropayment aggregation software from Peppercoin Inc. of Waltham, Mass.
Synergy Media's TouchMedia unit plans to install Peppercoin's Small Payment Suite to make it cheaper for stores to accept credit and debit cards at Synergy's kiosks, Peppercoin announced Tuesday.
Merchants have said that the fees card companies impose make it impractical to accept payment cards for low-cost purchases. Peppercoin's software aggregates several card purchases into one.
"People want to be able to use their debit and credit cards everywhere, even for purchases of just a few dollars, yet retailers need to be able to make a profit in order to run their business," said Mark Friedman, Peppercoin's president and chief executive, in a press release.
B of A Picks SunGard Software for Basel II
Bank of America Corp. has licensed Basel II compliance software from SunGard Data Systems Inc. of Wayne, Pa.
SunGard said Tuesday that the Charlotte banking company would use its BancWare Capital Manager software (previously called Basel II Capital Manager) to perform capital calculation and reporting, data consolidation, and credit risk and operational risk analysis.
Basel II, which mandates that the largest banks hold capital reserves based on their risk rather than their assets, will begin to take effect in 2009.
