Thursday, March 29, 2007

Metavante Image Solutions Announces New Division President-Gary Nelson Retires

(Metavante release - March 28, 2007)


Metavante Image Solutions today has named Brian C. Hurdis president of Metavante Image Solutions. Based in Oklahoma City, the Metavante Image Solutions division now counts approximately 1,000 employees within its operations, which includes facilities in Dallas, Herndon, Va., Longmont, Colo., Memphis, Tenn., Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Norman, Okla. Hurdis, a 25-year banking and financial technology industry professional, is a member of the Metavante Executive Committee. He joined Metavante in 1999 as vice president of technology operations and architecture for the company’s e-finance solutions. Among his recent responsibilities, Hurdis has been general manager for Metavante’s item processing and SendPoint product lines. Hurdis succeeds Gary L. Nelson, who has retired as division president to pursue volunteer leadership with several Oklahoma City not-for-profit organizations including North Church, Bearing Fruit Communications, Board of Regents for local universities, and a consortium board for high-tech entrepreneurs and start-up companies. In 1992, Nelson and several associates founded Advanced Financial Solutions (AFS), which along with the Endpoint Exchange Network was purchased by Metavante in 2004. After several additional image-technology acquisitions in 2005 and 2006, Nelson oversaw the successful integration of four companies during 2006 to create the Metavante Image Solutions division, of which he was president. “Gary has been a leader in the bank technology industry. We are grateful for the many contributions Gary made to Metavante and to AFS before it became a Metavante company,” said Metavante Chief Operating Officer Michael D. Hayford. “By combining the related solutions and services, Metavante has created an industry-defining technology platform designed to meet a broader range of customer needs. We thank Gary for his leadership throughout his years of service at Metavante and we applaud him for his ongoing commitment to the Oklahoma City community.” Metavante Image Solutions provide comprehensive solutions that help banks and businesses transition from paper to electronic payments and image processing. Within Image Solutions, the Endpoint Exchange Network is the country’s first electronic check-clearing network that capitalizes on existing imaging infrastructure and settlement relationships, with the interoperability to connect to every endpoint in the nation.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Questions on Remote Deposit Capture, Payment Automation,Forms Processing? TAWPI Forums and Expo will have the Answers! New Keynote Announced


The TAWPI 2007 Forums and Expo taking place August 12th to 15th in Boston has announced Patrick Donahoe the Deputy Postmaster General and Chief Operating Officer as one of two major keynote presenations at this years event. As the second-highest ranking postal executive, Donahoe, a 31-year postal veteran, reports directly to the Postmaster General and is a member of the Postal Service Board of Governors. Donahoe serves on the Capital Projects Committee.In addition to his Board duties, Donahoe has responsibility for the day-to-day activities of more than 690,000 career employees working among 38,000 facilities that are supported by a fleet of over 215,000 vehicles. He also is responsible for mail processing, transportation and delivery, field operations, engineering, delivery and retail, facilities, and network operations. Reporting to Donahoe are the Senior Vice President of Operations and nine Area Vice Presidents.

The TAWPI Forum and Expo will be delivering key content focused on emerging payments and document automatoin technologies which are transforming business processes to change the way organizations capture, manage, archive, and deliver mission-critical information. TAWPI is revolutionizing its annual conference bringing together forums and a comprehensive Expo on three of the biggest issues facing organizations today: Payments Automatoin, Remote Deposit Capture, and Imaging & Forms Processing.


For more information or to register click here:

Friday, March 16, 2007

Wal-Mart is Said to Have Big Banking Plans

from (Credit & Collections – March 14, 2007)

An Ohio representative is planning to release information today that suggests Wal-Mart’s ambitions into consumer banking may extend beyond what the retail giant had previously disclosed. The information, in the form of an e-mail message sent by a Wal-Mart employee, suggested that the company was laying the groundwork to offer its own banking products. Wal-Mart has long insisted that it was not interested in branch banking but was looking to use the bank as a way to save money. But Representative Paul E. Gillmor, an Ohio Republican, said last night that he was concerned that the undated e-mail message suggested that Wal-Mart was telling its tenants, some which are retail banks, that it was reserving the right to become a full-service bank, including the underwriting of mortgages. A Wal-Mart spokeswoman confirmed last night that the company had updated some of its tenant leases late last year to include the language in question but implied that it had been an option all along. “There is nothing new here,” the spokeswoman, Mona Williams, said. “While we recently updated language in our leases, similar language has been in our agreements for at least five years.” The new information comes as the House Financial Services Committee gears up for hearings next week on a closely watched law that would bar non-financial institutions, like Wal-Mart Stores and Home Depot, from operating a bank. Wal-Mart submitted an application in 2005 with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for an industrial bank in Utah that it said would be used to process its own credit and debit card transactions for its 3,500 United States stores. The application almost immediately ignited opposition from lawmakers, consumer groups and financial companies who worried that the company would use its reach to become a retail banking powerhouse. The legislation, and next week’s hearing, are fallout from the application. In an interview last night, Mr. Gillmor said the Wal-Mart was including a clause in some tenant leases that would allow the company to some day expand its banking operations. Wal-Mart currently offers branded credit cards, check cashing and other services through partnerships with financials institutions. “We simply became more specific late last year,” Ms. Williams said, referring to the additional term related to the mortgages. But Mr. Gillmor, who is co-sponsoring legislation that would prevent Wal-Mart and other non-financial institutions from expanding into retail banking, disagreed. “If they were not going to go into full-service banking, why in the world would they do that? There is no other reason,” he said. “They want to be prepared in case they get their way.” Mr. Gillmor would not say who provided him the e-mail document, but a person briefed on the situation said that it came from a banking industry group and was probably three or four weeks old. The e-mail message comes as Congressional lawmakers engage in the latest round of debate over whether non-financial companies, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, should be allowed to buy or charter so-called industrial loan companies that are operated like banks.
Along with Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Mr. Gillmor recently introduced the legislation that would prevent such companies from starting an industrial bank and restrict some existing ones from expanding. Mr. Gillmor said yesterday that he believed he had enough votes to pass the bill in the House and that there was a “very reasonable” chance of winning Senate approval. Wal-Mart’s application for an industrial loan company charter has been a hot-button political issue with banking industry groups aligning themselves with regulators and some of the company’s fiercest critics. The Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a speech earlier this month that if Congress was interested in keeping banking and commerce separate, “it should take note of this problem.” The F.D.I.C. said last month that it would extend a one-year moratorium on new applications for the industrial bank charters to allow lawmakers more time to weigh in on the issue. It first imposed a temporary ban in July. Besides Wal-Mart, Home Depot, DaimlerChrysler and Cargill have applications pending. Industrial banks have been around for about a century, initially appearing as small, state-charted banks that offered loans to low-income workers who were turned away by traditional banks. Their special status allowed them to remain exempt from laws barring commercial companies from owning banks. Even though only a handful of states offer charters, their growth has exploded. Today, they are a $177 billion industry, with about 60 companies from General Motors and General Electric to Target and Merrill Lynch operating industrial banks.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Integration with Oracle unleashes the power of document management. A case study

(Case Study featured in TODAY Magazine's Advances in Imaging and Forms Processing Special Supplement)

You might not think that extracting and delivering highway construction materials is a
very technologically sophisticated business. In the case of Rogers Group, Inc., however,
you would be mistaken. Nearly a century old, Rogers Group provides crushed stone, sand, gravel, asphalt, concrete masonry, and highway construction and materials recycling services in five states throughout Southeastern United States. On an average day, Rogers Group delivers 7,400 loads of material totaling some 180,000 tons of stone, sand, gravel and asphalt. During the peak summer season, the asphalt delivered in one month would pave 390 miles of two-lane highway or 1,931 football-fieldsized parking lots.

An operation of this magnitude generates an immense volume of documentation – bills of
lading, purchase receipts, invoices, sales tax documentation, plant and equipment purchase
and warranty records, and more. With nearly 100 locations spread across five states,
the Rogers Group’s paperwork could create a tangle of inefficiency and confusion if not
managed smartly – which is where its technological edge comes in.
Rogers Group tames its flurry of documents and turns all that paperwork into an accessible
and easily managed asset by utilizing ProfitStars’ Synergy Document Management
solutions. Creating Companywide Efficiencies While many companies have recognized the value of digital document management, few have leveraged it so extensively or integrated it so completely to their core accounting systems. At Rogers Group, hundreds of managers have instant access to important documents. And when those documents are associated with an Oracle accounting entry, they’re no farther than a mouse click away. The company utilizes ProfitStars’ solutions in its: Accounts Payable/Receivable Department – where vendor and company invoices are imaged and made accessible as support to accounting managers.
Human Resources Department – where the extensive documentation associated with
compensation and benefits for thousands of employees is managed digitally.
Fixed Assets Accounting Department – where purchase records on every truck, pump,
machine and real estate asset are maintained – more than 9,000 discrete assets in all.
Tax Accounting Department – where in like fashion, all documentation necessary to
prepare and document tax returns and sales tax reports is maintained. Tapping the Power of Integration Managers across the board rave about the simple, intuitive integration of Synergy
Document Management to their Oracle accounting system. Roger Kenigson, information
systems project leader, reports that by utilizing Synergy API Integration Toolkit and tools
built into Oracle, integrating the two systems was “not at all complicated to do. Oracle
just needs to be able to tell Synergy API what it wants, and once it does, Synergy pulls it
and presents a PDF.” With just a little help from ProfitStars engineers, Kenigson himself
completed all the scripting necessary for integration. Users report myriad benefits from the integration. “In a report you can be ‘sitting’ on an item and want to see backup,” notes Nancy Moore, senior fixed assets accountant. “For instance, we just purchased a loader, and
you want to see the invoice. You go to ‘Get Image’ and in an instant you’re looking at the invoice. The time savings is huge.” And with ProfitStars’ powerful, intuitive database
technology, Moore can quickly pull up any other records for that particular item — warranty records, sales tax documents and associated items, for example. Other users report similar results in speed, productivity and accuracy. Accounting manager Mollie Bowman notes
that accountants manage relationships with more than 10,000 vendors. It’s common for problems or discrepancies to crop up – for instance, two invoices with the same
invoice number from two different vendors. Once again, it’s a click of a menu to pull up an image of the invoices in question to ensure that they are being processed and paid
correctly. “We’re always researching things,” says Bowman. “For instance, a contract hauler who says he didn’t get paid. We can quickly look up the ticket and see if the wrong hauler
got keyed in.” ProfitStars makes it simple to resolve issues quickly, accurately and completely.
Accounting managers have also used the application to save a lot of trees. Every week a report detailing every transaction in the entire company is generated. “That’s a four- to five-thousand-page report across the whole company,” Bowman says. “That’s four to five thousand
pages we don’t have to print every week.” And it’s four to five thousand pages easily accessible to any manager who needs it, on any desktop in the company. Opening Access, Improving Accuracy Rogers Group’s use of Synergy Document Management in its fixed assets accounting group is a great example of how intelligent document management can save time, increase
accuracy and enhance convenience in a high-demand work
environment of any type. “Fixed assets” refers to any and every depreciable asset the
company purchases – from land to crushers to “rolling stock” (pickups, dump trucks, loaders) and even pumps and motors. Records must be kept active for seven years,
and a permanent record must be maintained even after the
asset is disposed of. For Rogers Group, that means maintaining accurate
documentation for more than 9,000 discrete fixed asset items in 150 different categories. What was once a paperbased system of “asset cards” is now managed digitally – a database that includes records back to 1940. Perhaps most helpful is the way the system has distributed responsibility for keeping records accurate and current. “We’re strict
now on fixed asset reporting,” says Nancy Moore. “We generate a ‘fixed-asset-by-location report.’ Area managers and plant managers are required to sign off that they do
have these assets.” Synergy Document Management means that if a manager sees a questionable item on the report– a pump he doesn’t recognize, for instance – and wants
to investigate, it’s a simple matter to “drill right into the report to see what that item is.” With Synergy Document Management, any user anywhere in the company with the
appropriate permissions can access the data; as a result, “we’ve done a huge cleanup of our files and data.” Further, using the Document Retention Tool, users can establish
criteria by which outdated files are automatically purged from the system.
For record keepers across the company, one additional benefit is “you don’t lose files like you do with paper files,” comments Moore. “They don’t ever get up and walk out of
your office and the documents you need are never farther
than a right-click away.” With the improvements in productivity and efficiency so
far, Bowman is continuing to look for ways to leverage Synergy Document Management – such as considering the Synergy Workflow Management application to create
further efficiencies by enabling electronic movement of tasks throughout the organization.

About ProfitStars
ProfitStars, a division of Jack Henry & Associates, Inc.
(Nasdaq: JKHY), is a leading provider of best-of-breed
products and services that are designed to improve the
operating performance of financial institutions of all asset
sizes and charters, and diverse corporate entities. These
products and services include proven solutions for revenue
and growth, risk mitigation and control, and cost control;
and complement existing core information processing
platforms.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Distributed Capture versus Centralized Capture

Logic and research tells me that Distributed Capture and Distributed Scanning is on the rise in imaging operations across vertical markets. Really the only exception being Services Bureaus where centralized scanning makes sense. In 2006 HSA and TAWPI completed a landmark Forms Processing Study which indicated that 69% have installed and/or are planning to install distributed scanning in their imaging operations within the next 12 months while 31% have really no plans of instituting distributed scanning. MFP usage is on the rise. Everything is pointing in the distributed capture direction. Right?

Well, I got thrown for a loop this morning. Each week on TAWPI’s homepage we have a Question of the Week. Last week's question was; “Do your anticipate you capture to become increasingly centralized or increasingly distributed?” We had approximately 200 respondents answering this question. To my surprise more than 80% who responded beleived their capture in the near future will become increasingly centralized. Wait a minute here…..

Now barring someone with a serious centralized capture agenda and answering this question multiple, multiple, mutliple times. Does this make sense? These visitors to TAWPI.org are most likely the same demographic who answered our forms processing survey; senior level/executive level Operations and IT professionals involved in imaging and forms processing operations from across all verticals....My interest level in this topic has surely peaked.

It looks like the TAWPI Forum and Expo this August in Boston will need to have on the agenda a Distributed Capture versus Centralized Capture full blown shoot out. Bring your pistols….

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

eFunds Corporation Becomes EFD, the Payments Solutions Company

EFD Simplifies Go-to-Market Strategy Focusing on Enterprise Payments and Data & Decisioning Solutions (Market Wire – March 5, 2007)

eFunds Corporation, the company that delivers innovative enterprise payments and data & decisioning solutions, today announced the global launch of its new corporate brand, now known simply as EFD. The company will transition to the new name, which is also its stock ticker symbol, over the next 18-24 months, during which time it will be known as EFD, eFunds Corporation. The move to EFD is closely tied to the evolution of the company's comprehensive value proposition around enterprise payments and data & decisioning solutions for global financial institutions, networks, merchants and large enterprises. Increasingly, these businesses are faced with growing pressure to optimize global payment processing operations, open more of the right customer accounts, and address fraud across the enterprise. To address this, they are turning to flexible, innovative solutions designed to increase the value of customer relationships while improving operational efficiency. The EFD value proposition is based on more than 35 years of experience in enterprise payments and data & decisioning expertise, leveraging industry-leading brands including EFD ChexSystems(SM), EFD DebitBureau, EFD DataNavigator, EFD CONNEX and EFD Prepaid Solutions. EFD customers will continue to benefit from the company's flexible delivery capabilities, which provide the option to run solutions as software, services or anything in between. Customers will also be able to take advantage of EFD's component business model, which provides the flexibility to integrate proven components within strategic enterprise solutions designed to solve more complex business problems. "As EFD, we are proud to present a new face to the world that comes at a time when global financial institutions, networks, merchants and large enterprises are looking for straightforward, yet comprehensive solutions to their biggest problems," said Paul F. Walsh, chairman & chief executive officer, EFD, eFunds Corporation. "Even more than our technology and data, these customers choose us for the business insight we deliver -- how we transform the complex requirements of a rapidly changing industry into solutions that help them acquire the right customers, serve them more efficiently and keep them."