Wausau Financial Systems Inc. is using its check imaging capabilities to reach larger clients, including those outside the banking industry.
Though the Mosinee, Wis., software company is perhaps best known to bankers as a provider of imaging software for midsize institutions, Joseph L. Delgadillo, its president and chief executive, said it is aiming higher. “We want to be the leader in distributed capture and document handling solutions,” he said last week.
One effort that is beginning to show fruit is a marketing partnership announced last July with Eastman Kodak Co. that Mr. Delgadillo said has helped “get our products into markets where we didn’t have a reach.”
Kodak, of Rochester, N.Y., announced plans this week to offer Wausau’s check-processing systems, which include scanners and archiving software, to its customers in business and in federal, state, and local government.
Andy Lawrence, the solutions business manager for Kodak’s document imaging business unit, said the remote-deposit systems give his company a way to move “beyond the archive and into the transaction.”
The systems enable big companies to convert checks into digital images and create an image cash letter that can be transmitted to a bank for deposit. Mr. Lawrence said Kodak is already working with some banks, and plans to announce its first customers next month. “We see a convergence between item processing and file-folder-type applications,” he said.
On the remittance-processing front, Wausau announced last week that First Data Corp.’s Remitco LLC of Omaha, one of the nation’s largest processors of retail lockbox payments, would use Wausau’s ImageRPS software to run all eight of its retail lockbox centers.
Scott Dickey, the president of Remitco, said six of those centers — the ones it acquired from Wachovia Corp. in 2004 — were already using Wausau systems. The other two use software from Unisys Corp. of Blue Bell, Pa.
After reviewing formal bids from several vendors, including Unisys, for 10 months, Remitco decided Wausau offered “the best long-term strategy” and “the best fit,” Mr. Dickey said. He estimated that it would take six to nine months to convert the remaining two centers to Wausau’s system.
Bob Meara, a senior analyst at Celent LLC, a Boston research and consulting firm, said more lockbox operators are likely to follow Remitco’s strategy of using the same applications at multiple check-processing sites. “Billers are national; they often segregate their work geographically” to reduce mail float, Mr. Meara said.
But as more billers use check imaging and check conversion technology and send data to corporate clients electronically, individual lockbox centers no longer operate as standalone operations, he said — and “maintenance and setup is significantly simplified” by using a standard technology.
Mr. Delgadillo said Wausau has the largest share of the remittance-processing market. Its customers, in addition to Remitco, include the major lockbox players Regulus Group LLC and Mellon Financial Corp.
The ImageRPS software that Remitco is installing can process payments through the automated clearinghouse — using accounts receivable conversion — or as image cash letters, Mr. Delgadillo said. There were 2.15 billion ARC transactions industrywide last year, and he estimated that about a third of them were created using Wausau systems.
Mr. Dickey said about 40% of Remitco payments are converted into ACH files using ARC, and that next quarter the company plans to begin offering an image cash letter service, which sends images of consumer checks to a biller’s bank for deposit.
Of Wausau’s 650 financial-company customers, Mr. Delgadillo said, about 100 are testing or using its distributed-capture technologies for teller, branch, or corporate locations. One trillion dollars of payments will have been imaged through those distributed-capture systems within 12 months, he estimated.
Mr. Delgadillo joined Wausau 15 months ago, when the Chicago private equity firm Frontenac Co. bought it.
At the time he said he intended to pursue acquisitions — but so far Wausau has made only one small one. It bought Kyris Image Software of Flower Mound, Tex., which made optical character-recognition and handwriting-recognition software.
Wausau remains interested in growth through acquisition, but “we’re not looking for bargains,” he said. “We’re looking for great technology that, working with our technology, will be very synergistic.”
