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Clearing House: UPIC Demand Climbing Asian Bank to Use BSG Overdraft Software More Upgrades Ahead for Mass. Thrift
Clearing House: UPIC Demand Climbing
The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC has reported a sharp increase in demand for its universal payment identification codes, which make automated clearing house payments more secure.
The New York company said Monday that transaction volume for payments to businesses using UPICs has exceeded $1 billion.
The code functions as a substitute account number for companies that want to receive ACH payments but do not want to give out their account numbers. Customers route ACH payments to a company's UPIC number rather than to a standard bank account number; when the bank receives the payment it is forwarded to the recipient.
UPICs were introduced in 2002, but until this year The Clearing House's Electronic Payments Network unit never set up more than three such accounts in a single year. This year it has set up 32, and it expects to have even more by the end of this week.
Rossana Salaris, a senior vice president at The Clearing House in charge of EPN, said that one bank has issued 82 UPICs to a single client. That is by far the largest order for the product to date, she said. She would not identify the bank, and she said she did not know the identity of the client.
She attributed the surge of interest to a presentation that Clearing House executives made at a recent conference hosted by the Association for Financial Professionals, a trade group for corporate treasury executives. Since the conference "corporations are asking banks for UPICs," Ms. Salaris said.
"2005 was just the beginning. Next year we expect more growth," she said.
Providing the codes is safer than giving out a company's bank account number because people cannot use a UPIC to debit a company's account or to forge a check. Users of the codes can also switch banks or bank accounts without changing the UPIC.
The Clearing House said eight EPN financial institutions have now issued the codes.
Asian Bank to Use BSG Overdraft Software
The $61.4 million-asset Asian Bank of Philadelphia expects the Web-based overdraft software it is installing to boost both fee income and customer retention, the bank's chief executive says.
S. Eric Beattie said Tuesday that he expects the software, CourtesyConnect from BSG Financial LLC of Louisville, to increase the bank's net fee income by 30% to 40%. The software should go live sometime next quarter.
Asian Bank's current overdraft system rejects overdrafts and charges for them. The BSG system permits customers to overdraw their accounts by up to $750 and charges them a fee for doing so.
"The customer will pay you for allowing them to do this on a regular basis," Mr. Beattie said.
CourtesyConnect was designed for small banks that have few technology-support employees, he said. If you run "a little bank," he said, "you've got to compete," he said.
More Upgrades Ahead for Mass. Thrift
Dedham Institution for Savings of Dedham, Mass., plans to upgrade its document management system again - once it takes care of a teller system upgrade.
Eighteen months ago the $866 million-asset mutual savings bank switched from laser-disc document storage to a system from Xenysys of Auburn Hills, Mich. that uses an array of hard discs.
But the next step - a software upgrade to the Xenware content-management system, which Xenysys announced last month - may have to wait until 2007, said James P. Hanlon, an assistant vice president at Dedham.
But the Xenware project is "a necessity," he said. "We're drowning in all the documents that we have." The thrift chose the Xenysys system because "we wanted someone who could give us a total document solution," Mr. Hanlon said.
Dedham's Xenysys system replaced a data storage system from Bell & Howell that relied on computer output to laser disc technology, known as Cold storage, to archive the reports received daily from Metavante Corp. Metavante, the technology subsidiary of the Milwaukee banking company Marshall & Ilsley Corp., provides Dedham's outsourced core processing and item processing.
This year the thrift upgraded the telephone system in its eight branches this year, and next year it plans to upgrade its teller technology using systems from Metavante.
