Headlines:
Unisys Sees a Loss for Fourth Quarter Phish Scams Scare Customers Away Overnight Check Delivery from Chase 3 Big Banks to Use eGifts for Transfers Illinois Bank Buys Aquracy Software
Unisys Sees a Loss for Fourth Quarter
Unisys Corp. expects to report a fourth-quarter loss - 7 to 10 cents a share - it said Tuesday.
The Blue Bell, Pa., company had earlier predicted a profit of 27 cents to 31 cents. It will report Jan. 25.
"We are disappointed by our fourth-quarter results, which came in below our expectations," said Joseph W. McGrath, its president and chief executive, in its press release.
Unisys said it will take a pretax, noncash impairment charge of $120 million, or 25 cents per share, to write off some assets of its outsourcing business, which it described as "challenging."
In addition, a delay in recognizing some revenue from a large five-year contract signed in December will reduce fourth-quarter earnings by 8 cents per share. Unisys had planned to recognize the revenue during the quarter to offset the cost of hardware and software delivered then. Instead it will recognize the revenue monthly over the life of the contract.
For the third quarter Unisys had posted net income of $25.2 million on revenue of $1.45 billion.
Phish Scams Scare Customers Away
Internet financial scams may be discouraging some people from banking online, according to a survey by Cyota Inc., which sells Web security software.
Phishing has made 70% of online adults with bank accounts less likely to respond to an e-mail from their bank, according to a survey Cyota conducted in November with the online market research company Infoserv.
More than half of the 655 respondents said they were less likely to sign up or keep using their bank's online services. Seventy percent said they were less likely to respond to any e-mail from a bank because of concerns that it might not be real. Five percent said they had already been fooled into divulging confidential information.
Half of all U.S. consumers with bank accounts have received at least one phishing e-mail message, Cyota's Financial Institution Online Fraud Survey found. That is twice as many as in its April survey, the New York company said Monday. Forty percent said apparently bogus e-mail traffic had increased. Phishing attempts have been increasing by about 30% monthly since April, the survey found.
Phishing messages purport to come from banks but are actually from criminals trying to trick recipients into visiting fake Web sites and revealing personal information that can be used for identity theft or bank account access.
Overnight Check Delivery from Chase
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.'s Bank One division has introduced an overnight check delivery service it says is the first of its kind.
For payments initiated online as late as 10 p.m. eastern standard time, United Parcel Service Inc. will deliver the next business day an official check drawn on the customer's account. The recipient can be anywhere in the continental United States; the charge is $14.99.
The service can be used to avoid penalties for late payments or to send money fast to friends or family members, JPMorgan Chase said. "We want our customers to be able to make payments to anyone, anytime, from anywhere," said Charles Scharf, its head of retail financial services, in a press release Tuesday.
The New York company acquired Bank One, of Chicago, in July. It said the service will be available to all JPMorgan Chase online banking customers once the post-merger integration is complete.
3 Big Banks to Use eGifts for Transfers
The funds-transfer technology vendor Gifts Software Inc. of New York has landed three big foreign banking companies as customers.
It said Tuesday that Mitsubishi Trust and Banking Corp. of Tokyo, Rabobank International of the Netherlands, and Banco do Brasil SA are all planning to implement its eGifts software, which can be used to initiate money transfers through a Web browser. The software also enables users to monitor the status of the transfers.
eGifts stands for "enhanced global integrated funds/wires transfer and telecommunications system." Gifts Software's press release quoted Kotaro Suzuki, Mitsubishi Trust's vice president of information systems, as saying the product uses "the most up-to-date technology and was the best fit for the bank's requirements."
Gifts Software also offers regulatory compliance and cash management software.
Illinois Bank Buys Aquracy Software
Aquracy Corp. of Birmingham, Ala. has landed a first customer for its new software for remote capture of check images - the $1.5 billion-asset American Chartered Bancorp Inc. of Schaumberg, Ill..
Harold Smith, the payment technology vendor's vice president of sales and marketing, said that American Chartered plans to be using Aqurit Remote Capture by the end of January. The product should be available to other banks in March, he said.
The software, a single-user version of Aquracy's program for wholesale and retail lockbox, works with tabletop check image scanners from Panini SpA of Turin, Italy, and Canon Inc. of Tokyo. It is meant for branches and other facilities that would transmit the digitized images of as many as 5,000 checks per day to a processing center.
Businesses that receive many checks could also use the system to transmit them to their bank for deposit. Recognition of the numerical "courtesy amount" and the verbal "legal amount" on a check as well as check imaging archiving are optional features, Mr. Smith said.
