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Real-Time Access Was the Motive
Commercial Federal Bank of Omaha moved its retail banking Web site to technology from Corillian Corp. of Portland, Ore., to provide customers with real-time access to account information, an executive says.
The new system can, for example, show a customer who logs on from work at lunchtime a record of an automated teller machine withdrawal that morning.
"I think that's what is really going to retain the online banking customers," said Karen Baldwin, a first vice president and the director of alternate delivery at the $12.9 billion-asset Commercial Federal Corp. subsidiary, in an interview last week.
The Corillian system replaced a "memo-posting" system the bank outsourced to a company that InteliData Technologies Corp. of Reston, Va., has bought. Commercial Federal outgrew that system, Ms. Baldwin said. "As the Internet progressed we wanted a more modern system, and our customers were demanding it."
The other finalist for the contract claimed to have real-time capabilities, but "we would have been the first ones rolling it out," Ms. Baldwin said. "That's not always a great experience." She did not name the company.
The bank subsidiary signed the contract with Corillian in June 2002. It tested the system with employees in April of this year and took it live with retail customers in May.
The implementation involved five vendors, including Fiserv Inc., to which Commercial Federal outsources its core processing, and Princeton eCom Corp., the bank's e-payments processor.
The system uses Corillian's Voyager 3.0 banking software. Corillian will host the system for at least a year; Commercial Federal can bring it in-house after that. "We haven't made that decision, but we wanted the option," Ms. Baldwin said.
CheckFree Goes Against the Grain
As rivals pursue new strategies to present bills to customers online, CheckFree Corp. is upgrading a software suite to let billers produce electronic statements.
The new version, i-Series 5 from the Atlanta company's i-Solutions unit, has more business-to-business billing features, more international capabilities, and development tools designed to support Web services, executives say.
The upgrade, announced Aug. 26, was aimed more at companies that produce bills than at the financial institutions that present them to customers. But as Sean E. Feeney, an executive vice president of CheckFree and the general manager of the software division, noted in an interview Aug. 27 that "banks are billers too."
Credit card issuers, many of them banks, were pioneers in e-billing, and the biggest B-to-B project that CheckFree is working on is with a bank, Mr. Feeney added. (He would not name it.)
CheckFree is best known as the leading provider of consolidated electronic bill payment and presentment services. But to Bank of America Corp. and others it also is No. 1 producer of e-billing software. A May report by Avivah Litan, a research director at Gartner Inc., put its market share at 36%, and Ms. Litan said that though the i-Solutions software accounted for less than 2% of CheckFree's revenue, the business is a key to its goal of dominating EBPP.
In the past two years consolidated bill presentment has been losing ground to the biller-direct approach, in which a company puts customer statements on its own Web site rather than sending them to a service such as CheckFree's. The Needham, Mass., research firm TowerGroup reported in June that biller direct now accounts for 56% of e-statements; two years ago consolidated presentment held 58% of the market.
Ray J. Simonson, the chief technology officer of the i-Solutions unit, said CheckFree plans to support both strategies. "There's an awful lot of people who want to put up biller direct sites as a first step," he said.
And though CheckFree in time wants to have customers view all bills in one place, he said, "While we're getting there we want to be participating in that business."
Some are skeptical of CheckFree's prospects. Gary R. Craft of the San Francisco e-finance advisory firm Financial DNA LLC reiterated a "sell" rating on the company's stock Aug. 24 after viewing the new BillDirect aggregation software product from Yodlee Inc. of Redwood City, Calif.
Mr. Craft called the software, which collects statement data from biller-direct sites for consolidated presentment at a bank's Web site, "a category killer" that could steal business from CheckFree due to its lower cost.
"We'll see where the market shakes out," Mr. Feeney said. "I don't want to speculate on what competitors are doing in that area."
Provident of Md. Opts for Optika
Provident Bankshares Corp. of Baltimore has licensed document imaging and work-flow management software from Optika Inc. to replace a 10-year-old archive that contains more than 10 million digitized documents in a midrange IBM AS 400 computer.
The parent of the $5 billion-asset Provident Bank of Maryland has been loading the Optika software on a test server and was to begin training this month. It also aims to begin testing the system this month.
The idea is to remove as much paper as possible. Getting the software from Optika, of Colorado Springs, was the first step; the next will be to use it in conjunction with electronic signature pads in branches.
Daniel C. Sigmon, the managing director of information technology at Provident Bankshares, said it chose Optika's Acorde family of imaging and work-flow software and that it should make a decision within 60 days on a provider for the signature pads.
Executives decided nine months ago to upgrade the image system, Mr. Sigmon said in an interview last week. "The right thing to do was not just to upgrade or replace the system on a one-to-one basis, but to take a new look and see what we could do to improve the bank."
