Headlines:
Mississippi Bank Chooses Harland Billserv Sees New Life After Deal IBM: Japan Now, Other Nations Later
Mississippi Bank Chooses Harland
A new lending system at BankPlus should simplify loan processors' jobs and ease maintenance, executives say.
BankPlus, a subsidiary of the community bank holding company BancPlus Corp. in Belzoni, Miss., selected the financial.center software package from Harland Financial Solutions Inc., an Atlanta subsidiary of the check printer John H. Harland Co.
The decision to use the Internet product followed an 18-month review of five vendors, said William M. Thompson, an executive vice president and senior loan officer at the $1.1 billion-asset BankPlus.
The software will run on the corporate intranet, replacing a DOS-based application that the bank had used since the early 1990s. "It was time for us to go out there and take a look around," Mr. Thompson said in an interview Monday.
He said it will be implemented in September.
David P. McLeod, a senior vice president and the director of technology and operations, said financial.center's Web-centric design is "a lot easier for us to maintain and support, because we don't have to go to each workstation to upgrade the software. That gets to be a cumbersome process, even with a central loan group."
BankPlus has a centralized loan operation that processes applications from all of the bank's 47 offices, Mr. Thompson said. The application's compatibility with BankPlus' core processing system by Kirchman Corp., which the bank will continue to use for loan servicing, also .
BankPlus will use the product for consumer and commercial loans but not for mortgages, Mr. Thompson said.
Harland said BankPlus is the 100th institution to buy the financial.center application.
Billserv Sees New Life After Deal
The struggling Billserv Inc. announced Tuesday that it had agreed to sell most of its assets to CyberStarts Inc. for $4.8 million.
The cash influx will allow the electronic billing provider to refocus its remaining operations and pay off debts as it attempts to move from bill presentment to processing.
Billserv president Louis Hoch said the San Antonio company is selling its bill presentment service bureau components and its customer roster. It will retain its Bills.com consumer portal; its transaction volume has been growing about 50% per quarter.
Discussing Billserv's goal of making a transition into back-end processing, Mr. Hoch said it is "not a processing engine now, but we are going to become a processing engine. Our going-forward plan is to be a processor for Visa and MasterCard."
CyberStarts chief executive officer Ashish Bahl said the deal covers the bulk of Billserv's assets and that he plans to merge the incoming bill presentment and consumer payment capabilities with his company's corporate disbursement services. "This gives us another payment service."
CyberStarts, of Atlanta, says the combined operations will have more than 1,000 clients and sales of $20 million.
Billserv has posted losses every quarter since it opened for business three and a half years ago, and at the end of March reported an accumulated deficit of $47.9 million. Its stock has traded below $1 since last July, and was delisted from Nasdaq in February. Though the amount of the CyberStarts deal is far less than this sum, Mr. Hoch said his company will be debt-free when the deal is completed. (It is expected to close in the next six weeks.)
Mr. Bahl said Billserv's creditors "are going to be taken care of, "and there will be a little left over for them to do whatever their going to do."
IBM: Japan Now, Other Nations Later
Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Ltd. plans to develop a shared information-technology system with four regional banks in Japan, outsourcing the operation to a start-up company that will be managed by IBM Japan
The new company will provide its services to the banks under IBM's utility-like on-demand model for IT resources, an approach that IBM executives hope to apply in other countries.
The banks will be responsible for the technologies and products that differentiate them in the marketplace, said Osamu Nishioka, a business unit executive in the financial services sector of IBM Japan, an affiliate of International Business Machines Corp. He cited branch office systems as an example.
The start-up company, which is to be established by yearend, is to run the shared operation. The participating banks are to move their operations to the system by 2007.
Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, a unit of the holding company Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group Inc., had relationships going back to the 1980s with the four regionals - Ashikaga Bank Ltd., in the Tochigi Prefecture; Hyakujushi Bank Ltd., based in the city of Takamatsu; Juroku Bank Ltd., serving the Chubu region; and Joyo Bank Ltd., in the Ibaraki Prefecture.
The first phase of the project will include 48 banking applications, such as deposit and loan systems, foreign exchange systems, and customer information systems, Mr. Nishioka said by e-mail Monday.
The new company will participate in a separate venture involving Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, IBM, and more than 20 regional Japanese banks to share access to the Swift messaging system operated by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication for foreign-exchange trading, Mr. Nishioka said.
