Headlines:
Fiserv Clinches Australian Deal
Fiserv Inc. has clinched a deal to provide check-processing and image archiving services to a consortium of three of Australia's biggest banks.
The contract is expected to generate $460 million a year of revenue, it said Friday.
The Brookfield, Wis., company first disclosed in November that it was in talks with the consortium, Vipro Pty. Ltd., whose members are Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank, and Westpac Banking Corp.
Peter Abbot, Commonwealth's executive general manager of retail operations, said in a press release that the deal "provides an excellent opportunity for Australian banks to work together to more effectively manage the cost of check-processing operations."
The banks will share check-processing facilities and provide the personnel, who will become employees of Fiserv. The U.S. company will handle the banks' image capture, lockbox processing, archiving, and exception processing through a single shared image repository.
A general decline in check volume has driven many banks to consider such arrangements to reduce processing costs. The three Australian banks processed about 800 million checks last year, and Commonwealth said their volume is falling about 5% a year.
Fiserv expects to begin handling checks for Commonwealth and National in six cities in the second quarter and to add Westpac's checks in the second half.
The U.S. company also handles check processing for Intria Items Inc. of Mississauga, Ontario, a joint venture it formed in 1996 with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Intria is Canada's second-largest check-processing operation.
In the United Kingdom, three major banks and the consulting and outsourcing provider Unisys Corp. set up Intelligent Processing Services Ltd. in 2000, which now handles 70% of the country's check volume.
Processing Boosts Harland's 4Q
John H. Harland Co., the big check printer, said core processing operations helped deliver strong results in the fourth quarter.
Net income surged 25.3% from a year earlier, to $21.1 million, or 75 cents a share, and sales were up 5.1%, to $219 million, Harland said Wednesday.
Income for software and services jumped 48.1%, to $10.4 million. Harland said core processing was a big profit driver and should become even more important to it.
The company has been expanding in that business through acquisition. In November it bought Fair Isaac Corp.'s processing unit, and last week announced that it was buying Intrieve Corp. of Cincinnati, which made it the No. 5 core processing provider.
Harland's full year net income was down 1.5%, to $55.1 million, though sales rose by the same percentage, to $798.5 million.
The company predicted per-share earnings of 50 to 55 cents for this year's first quarter and $2.38 to $2.43 for the full year.
