Headlines:
Infosys Has Solid Fiscal Third Quarter Payment Data Execs' Unpaid-Wages Deal Peppercoin Meets Card Firms' Criteria
Infosys Has Solid Fiscal Third Quarter
Infosys Technologies Ltd., an outsourcing provider based in India, said revenue for its fiscal third quarter rose 53%.
The Bangalore company said it had revenue of $423 million for the period, which ended Dec. 31. Net income rose 58% year over year, to $112 million.
Infosys signed 38 new clients in the three months and added 2,280 employees, raising its head count to 35,000, it said in a press release issued Wednesday.
Infosys said it anticipates a 49% revenue increase, to $452 million, for the current quarter.
Infosys was No. 25 on the FinTech 100 last year, when it had revenue of $1.1 billion. About $383 million of that was from the financial services industry. It specializes in offshore IT outsourcing in six industries, including financial services, telecommunications, and retail. It also offers the Finacle core banking software platform. 
Payment Data Execs' Unpaid-Wages Deal
Several executives at Payment Data Systems Inc. have agreed to accept common stock in the company in place of unpaid wages.
Michael R. Long, the chairman and chief executive of the San Antonio payment processor, said in an interview Thursday that four employees - about half the staff - were four to six months behind on their salaries.
Mr. Long will receive more than 321,000 shares instead of more than $65,700 in back pay. Mr. Long was paid $201,000 in 2003, filings show.
In all, Payment Data said, the compensation committee of its board of directors granted 859,743 shares to employees, saving the company $179,000 it owed them in pay. That is nearly equal to its revenue from January through September of last year.
The company said the shares will be issued from its employee stock plan. Payment Data shares have been hovering between 30 and 35 cents in recent weeks.
Payment Data, founded in 1998 as Billserv to provide electronic bill payment and presentment services, sold substantially all of its assets in mid-2003 and began to reposition itself as a processor of automated clearing house transactions and debit and credit card payments. It also operates an online bill-payment portal.
The company also said this week that it had received nearly $333,000 from the equity firm Dutchess Advisors LLC of Boston after issuing nearly 1.3 million shares to the firm's Dutchess Private Equities Fund LP pursuant to an equity line of credit.
The publicly traded Payment Data has made progress financially, according to its earnings reports, though it remains in the red. It reported in November that its net loss for the first nine months of 2004 narrowed by 24% from a year earlier, to $1 million, while revenue grew 129%, to $188,600.
Mr. Long said in the interview that the company's processing volume continues to increase. December's was four times that of November, he said, and by yearend Payment Data should show positive cash flow and an operating profit.
Peppercoin Meets Card Firms' Criteria
Peppercoin Inc. of Waltham, Mass., said its line of small-value transaction software is the first to be certified as compliant with the major card companies' current data security standards.
It said last week that Ambiron LLC, a Chicago company that aggregates security standards, helped it get certification from Visa USA for Visa's Cardholder Information Security Process standard and from MasterCard International for MasterCard's Site Data Protection standard.
Peppercoin said its software also complies with American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services standards and the recently adopted Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.
