BANKLINK Unit of Fiserv to Present Merits of Electronic Bill Payment and ACH Origination Services

Business Wire, Sept 28, 2004

NEW YORK -- ABA Annual Convention session will present considerations for financial institutions and their small-business customers

BANKLINK, a unit of Fiserv, Inc. (Nasdaq:FISV) and a leading provider of Web-based treasury management products and services, announced today that it will give a presentation titled: "Electronic Bill Payments and the Small Business: EBP and ACH" at the 2004 ABA Annual Convention.

"Small businesses, with their own specific needs for time-saving, convenient and easy-to-use features, are especially appreciative of Web-based electronic bill payment (EBP) and automated clearinghouse (ACH) tools," said BANKLINK Senior Business Consultant Lucy Suarez. "EBP and ACH origination services can provide enormous benefits to small businesses. For the bank, each service can provide a competitive edge, but each also has different characteristics to be considered. This session will help both small businesses and banks determine the best next steps in acquiring or offering EBP and ACH origination services."

EBP and ACH both have their place in the small-business marketplace, according to Suarez. Within the small office/home office (SOHO) segment, EBP is increasingly being utilized chiefly because of its singular ability to automate the payment process of suppliers whether they are electronically enabled or require checks. With business features like simple approval requirements and remittance information being included with the payment, EBP's reach has been extended from its consumer origins. As the SOHO segment grows in revenue and employee base, ACH becomes increasingly attractive for payroll and tax-payment applications, as well as for Internet-enabled businesses that are collecting electronic payments from their customers. At the upper end of small business, both payment applications co-exist and are utilized for their inherent strengths.

Once companies' ACH transactions are submitted into the ACH system, the ODFI (originating bank) is liable to make settlement with the Federal Reserve regardless of its customers' ability to do the same. Therefore, in developing a program to offer ACH-based services to small business, it is essential for institutions to examine their credit-risk policy, according to Suarez. This may involve establishing credit limits for each customer and then monitoring customer activity against those limits. If establishing limits is not feasible, then pre-funding can be applied so that the amount of a company's payments are transferred automatically from the settlement account into a reserve account prior to origination of the end-of-day file.

For EBP, the choice of an electronic payments provider and payment model is important. Due to the cost of establishing electronic connections with multiple billers, as well as the need to support paper checks to smaller-volume billers, most banks contract with "pay anyone" EBP vendors to provide this service. Vendor choice is most often based on pricing, customer service and branding ability.

In terms of controlling risk, the good-funds model assumes that the bank will stand behind its customer's electronic settlement debits and insure them, allowing payments to be made by the EBP vendor immediately as they are backed by the bank. In the risk model, the EBP vendor determines the risk based on credit scoring of whether a bill payment is likely to be backed by funds and assumes the risk for the payment. In this model, when a payment is not made due to non-sufficient funds (NSF), the EBP provider goes to the small business and not the bank to secure funds. The choice of payment model and EBP vendor is an important one for the bank in determining how much control over interactions the bank will have with its customers.

The session will be conducted on Tuesday, October 5, from 2 to 3:15 p.m. at the New York Marriott Marquis in New York City. More information is on the ABA Web site at www.ABA.com.

More information on BANKLINK

BANKLINK, on the Web at www.BANKLINK.com, leads with customer-focused treasury management solutions through experience and vision. Established in 1977 as a full-service electronic banking company, today BANKLINK provides product and service solutions to more than 130 financial institutions worldwide to meet the needs of 20,000 treasury management customers. The BANKLINK portfolio of information reporting and transaction initiation services features iLINK(TM), bizLINK(TM), the exchangeLINK(SM) suite of account aggregation and sweep services, BANKLINK SERIES 2000(TM) and BANKLINK MoneyWorks(TM). BANKLINK is located in New York, New York and is a unit of Fiserv.

Fiserv, Inc. (Nasdaq:FISV) provides information management systems and services to the financial industry, including transaction processing, business process outsourcing and software and systems solutions. The company serves more than 15,000 clients worldwide, including banks, broker-dealers, credit unions, financial planners and investment advisers, insurance companies and agents, self-funded employers, lenders and savings institutions. Headquartered in Brookfield, Wisconsin, Fiserv reported $2.7 billion in processing and services revenues for 2003. Fiserv can be found on the Internet at www.fiserv.com.