On The Money from BankServ

BankServ Gets PASS

2006-07-19T15:34:00.000-07:00

“A new payments consortium called PASS (Payments As a Secure Service) announced its formation at the Microsoft Developers Conference. The consortium, which is led by IP Commerce, intends to exploit new features in Windows Vista, including the operating system's enhanced security and discovery features.”

BankServ is excited to be part of the consortium. See http://www.paymentsnews.com/2006/07/pass_consortium.html.

BankServ saves 3 million businesses a trip to the gas station

2006-07-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

Still depositing checks at the bank? Find another reason to get out of the office. BankServ enables you to send deposits to the bank (any bank) directly from the desktop. See more about DepositNow! at BankServ.com. Starting in late Summer of 2006, DepositNow will also include an option to interface with the QuickBooks® accounting system and will automatically update your accounts receivable every time you make a deposit. Here's an excerpt from a recent article:

"DepositNow! is an inexpensive, easy-to-use program that utilizes Optical Character Recognition OCR/MICR scanning technology to capture digital images of checks and use them for an electronic deposit, a practice permitted since 2004 by the Check Clearing for the 21st Century (Check 21) Act."

See the full article at finextra.com.

Local and international

2006-06-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

Did you know BankServ is the only company acting as both an international (SWIFT) service bureau and Fedwire service?

Global Funds Exchange Network (GFXN) offers a way to use BankServ’s comprehensive GFX wire payments system with minimal up-front investment. As a service bureau solution, the GFX program is hosted in BankServ’s data centers, giving banks access to all the automation and features that come with GFX, but without the expenses that come with operating a software system in-house.

Visit BankServ.com for more information.

Federal Trade Commission Consumer's Guide

2006-06-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Federal Trade Commission Consumer's Guide has a bunch of useful information about electronic commerce. With all of the payment options available to consumers, how do businesses keep up with the receipt and management of payments.

Most online shoppers use credit cards to pay for their online purchases. But debit cards — which authorize merchants to debit your bank account electronically — are increasing in use.

BankServ makes this easy for businesses and financial institutions to process electronic payments, online, on the phone or integrated with the most sophisticated backend banking systems. Visit us at BankServ.com today for more information.

"Small business pessimism grows" but there is hope

2006-06-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

Small business confidence is suffering, with 63 percent of businesses in a recent survey by SurePayroll, believe that inflation will negatively impact their business this year (2006).

Jessica Seid, a CNNMoney.com staff writer, wrote:

"Nearly two-thirds, or 63 percent, of respondents believe inflation will have a negative impact on their business in 2006.

Fifty-three percent of those surveyed have seen their costs of doing business rise over the last several months.

Of those businesses that have incurred increasing supply costs, 79 percent have not raised their prices to pass along their increasing expenses to their customers."

Small businesses care a lot about their customers, often having a closer relationship with them than larger corporations. BankServ helps smaller businesses with remote deposit and electronic payment solutions, allowing businesses to receive and deposit electronic payments. Saves time. Saves money. Saves optimism.

Transaction and data reporting regulation in changing times

2006-06-09T11:45:00.000-07:00

Here's another reason to choose BankServ as your worldwide electronic payment partner. BankServ's various reporting tools allow businesses to sustain compliance for government audits, important for keeping up-to-date with the ever-changing regulations surrounding data, security and cash management.

From Rob Blackwell, "Fincen Wire Plan Moves to Slow Lane", published in American Banker on Thursday, June 1, 2006:

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network had been expected to deliver its feasibility study on the issue by Wednesday, but said this week that it would be indefinitely postponed because the agency was seeking additional input from banking regulators. Several sources said that the regulators - particularly the Federal Reserve Board - are skeptical of any new wire reporting requirement and will probably urge Fincen to recommend against adopting it.

The delay comes as Fincen is facing more questions about its capacity to implement a new reporting scheme.

Banking industry representatives pointed to a report last week from the Treasury Department's Office of Inspector General that said Fincen's analysis of Bank Secrecy Act data is hampered by data management problems and weak internal controls. On Tuesday, Fincen also said it was extending by 30 days a decision to stop work on BSA Direct, a program designed to aid law enforcement officials' retrieval of bank filings, because it is continuing to evaluate why the program failed to meet performance milestones.

"These are very much connected from our perspective," said Richard Riese, the director of the American Bankers Association's Center for Regulatory Compliance. "People should really hesitate going forward at this time with a reporting requirement that is going to generate a huge amount of data when it is not at all clear that Fincen has the appropriate controls for maintaining the security of the data."

Wire Transfer Rush

2006-06-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

Hearing “Wow – that’s so fast!” gives me a rush. When I see thoughtful eyes and furrowed brows consider the ramifications of adding multiple banks and remote users to the future of a growing financial firm, a smile spreads across my face. Training new corporate users on Global Funds Exchange (GFX) is very rewarding.

Banking is not my trade. I’m a teacher. Instructing today’s bankers is more interesting than most would think. My trainees are innovative problem solvers who want to serve their customers as quickly and completely as possible while taking advantage of budding technology. They are hands-on managers of information, not just data entry operators or middle managers. These students motivate me to know the GFX wire transfer application as completely as possible.

The developers at BankServ are constantly growing and adjusting GFX to match the needs of our dynamic customers, some of very large financial institutions and other from smaller, growing businesses able to compete in their industry in many cases for the first time ever at this level. I listen to the suggestions and requests of my trainees knowing that those useful and viable ideas will appear in future versions of Global Funds Exchange.

For funds transfer is anything but slow and plodding. Speed and reliability are required. Speed is easy to demonstrate at BankServ. Our wire transfer product has been bench tested as generating well over 1,000 wires per minute. The reliability of GFX is born out by the 36 financial corporations for which BankServ is the wire transfer network and that many more companies that use our software and monitor their own servers and communication links. The 1998 authorization of GFX by the United States Federal Reserve Bank gives us some credibility too.

Most non-bankers think of banks as being all the same. This is far from true, and GFX has the ability to morph into a product that financial institutions of all sorts can use easily. Credit unions and international financial corporations, industrial loan banks and federal home loan banks, small local banks and nationwide insurance companies use Global Funds Exchange. Our banks often specialize in the customers they want to support – niche banking. Therefore, our GFX support staff must learn about wire transfer in the real estate market or how GFX can meet small start-up company needs, how a lawyer might use wire payments and what a growing community bank with 90 branches spread throughout a rural area must do to train its own employees on their new tool.

To add to the diversity of our workplaces, we are becoming more involved in international banking. TurboSWIFT, the application BankServ supports around the world, interfaces with GFX so that United States banks may wire payments wherever they are needed. GFX can even send wires in foreign currency, which saves the sender money and keeps U.S. dollars in our own economy. Maybe someday I will train bank employees in France and finally use my 10 years of French classes.

My fellow GFX support team members continue to impress me with their ability to learn new information and share their experience. The Implementation Project Managers remind me of border collies; they are excellent organizers – gently nudging and herding our new users through the maze of setting up the physical environment for GFX, urging the testing of our software at the bank site, showing the new users how to use GFX to earn accreditation from the Federal Reserve, and finally assisting the banks as they cutover into production.

I’m part of the team that the GFX project manager turns to during implementation. A Trainer and Implementation Engineer are assigned to each new GFX bank. Implementation Engineer is a long title for our technical wizards. Their knowledge of the links between software and hardware is amazing, and they can communicate with non-techies too!

Once a GFX bank goes into production, our Production Support team guides the institution. This group has heard everything from, “I don’t know what key I pressed, but the screen just went blank and everything stopped working!” to “We’ve just bought another bank and need to go through the process of merging their ABA with ours. Where do we start?” Production Managers and Technical Support are always there to rescue and/or organize a new project that changes the configuration of GFX at a user’s site.

Actually, “Wow – that’s so fast!” is something that goes through my mind when I realize that I have been a BankServ employee for almost 10-months. Banking is boring?!? Never at BankServ.

GFXE: GFX for Education

2006-06-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

After reading the previous blog entry by Edward K, I discovered the google search listed two significant entries above MB Financial and Bremer Bank: Univerisity of Washington and University of Minnesota. Both institutions listed methods and policies regarding electronic wire transfers. This raises the question: Could GFX be implemented in the educational sector? With monetary funds transfer progressively becoming more virtual, there is an expectation that the monetary technology long used in the private sector would find itself utilized in the educational arena.

In 2001 UC Berkeley was able to finally accept electronic payments from incoming students. Yet, departmental monetary transfers still relied heavily on paper checks and teller transfers. A Citrix/Peoplesoft environment was implemented to help with departmental purchases and monetary transfers. Unfortunately, the system was confusing and slow, driving away most users' acceptance.

If BankServ could work with an educational institution to develop a GFX system complimentary to the financial system in schools, the basic model could potentially be applied and sold to other educational markets that utilize similar financial transactions.

BankServ customers get high rank in Google

2006-06-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

Google ranking statistics and "who hits first" ads have real, proven value for the Marketing and Sales crews. But among the tech geeks there's a 'high' that comes with getting your latest tweak, mod, or hack out on the net and scoreing with a front page ranking. :D During a recent trip to the Google page for some bits of information, I took a random shot with some keywords that best describe the software I support every day: "banking domestic wire transfer."

Imagine my surprise that among the handful of banks that had front page rankings, two of them are BankServ customers!

Bremer Bank and MB Financial are both BankServ GFX customers, one running their own in-house and the other in the Bankserv service bureau. I think we should drop both banks a note thanking them for keeping their 'web' faces so high! While we do not have a direct link from their Wire Services page, I believe their confidence in the Bankserv product will pay off with the only kind of marketing a tech like me responds to...word-of-mouth.

GFX: Wire processing in the post-millenium age

2006-06-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

In the conservative world of banking, systems that securely delivered money transfers, were well-established, time-tested. The folk wisdom of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" pervaded as the new millenium dawned. But many challenges soon rocked the boat. The year 2000 presented it's own challenge of computer viability, and as banks were directly targeted in the World Trade Center attacks, the vulnerability of having centralized, unsecured processes became evident. Soon after, the Enron scandal exposed a parallel vulnerability in having operations and audit procedures that went unchecked, especially in an increasingly digitized world. The impetus for change in these events provided dramatic sparks, and fortunately, vastly improved computer and security processes were in the offing as software companies worked to meet the sudden demand.

BankServ was one of the companies that happened to be in the position to give banks the tools they needed to address the security, audit and automation concerns that cropped up in this environment. Software efficiency, security, and ease of use had evolved greatly during the dot.com boom years, and BankServ had worked hard to address the obvious need to update software applications that facilitated electronic payments. Wire transfers, of course, are a primary piece of electronic payment activity. Dubbed "Global Funds Exchange" or "GFX" for short, BankServ's wire transfer system was first developed in 1996 at the request of a large bank, and then quickly adapted and made available for small to medium banks. Now, eighty bank corporations of all sizes use GFX for their wire transfer processes, comprising 3% of the nations wire transfer volume.

Initially, GFX addressed ease of use issues--data input and verification processes that ensured accuracy and simple access. OFAC screening concerns were also addressed by enabling automated screening for all wires. After 9/11, disaster recovery became the focus as banks worked to stratify and protect their operations. BankServ had those strategies in place with GFX, factors that assisted three bank corporations recover from the direct consequence of 9/11, and later Hurricane Katrina. And as new government regulations (such as Sarbanes/Oxley)came in to play after a cascade of corporate scandals, GFX was enhanced to address reporting and audit requirements.

Along the way, banks were actively competing to offer a broader array of services to their customers while still maintaining accounting control and audit review capabilities. In response to this effort, BankServ developed GFX to become a multi-faceted system enabled to integrate with many online cash management banking systems such as Digital Insight, Pulitzer & Haney, and to provide real-time communictation with a wide variety of host accounting systems such as ITI, Metavante and Fiserv. Banks that chose GFX for their wire processing system have really been choosing automation and integration for all their other banking systems to operate smoothly and in real time.

International transfer payment processing--including FX Foreign Exchange Currency rate processing--has also become a growing need. Accordingly, GFX has been enhanced to facilitate direct SWIFT payment processing and to enable banks to obtain and fix dynamic real-time FX rates for international wire transfers through Wells Fargo's FXOL system. Wire transfers can also be received within one system (Fedwire or SWIFT) and automatically passed to the other. The net result is full automation with sending and receiving international transactions.

All in all, GFX has become a full-fledged wire transfer system that comprensively addresses all of a bank's needs. From the simple process of getting funds to go from Point A to Point B, GFX makes sure that all concerns and communications along the way get taken care of.

Article: Encouraging Women to be entrepreneurs

2006-05-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

Female business owners get push to expand enterprises with cash, mentors, marketing

by Ilana DeBare, Chronicle Staff Writer

The San Francisco Chronicle this weekend highlighted Sterling HSA, a DepositNow! customer since 2002. Talking on the topic of female entrepreneurs, Cora Tellez was quoted to say:

"Women are naturally inclined to work cooperatively with clients, suppliers, even competitors; and to take a long view regarding success."

- Cora Tellez, Owner

We agree! As one of Steling HSA's suppliers, BankServ shares the long term vision for coorperative and efficiently run businesses.

dBusinessNews.com Reports BankServ Named to the Inner City 100

2006-05-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

For the third straight year, BankServ, a San Francisco-based financial services provider, has been named to the Inner City 100.
"In the past decade, a lot has changed in the San Francisco business climate -- soaring rents, the rise and fall of the high-tech sector, and the increasing appeal of outsourcing certain jobs to other companies or to other countries, to name a few," said David F. Kvederis, BankServ's president and CEO. "We view it as a remarkable sign of stability that BankServ has kept its core operations at home while at the same time expanding into the national and global markets."

BankServ is a leading U.S. provider of Fed wire transfer, SWIFT and TurboSwift, ACH and Check 21 payment solutions for banks, governments, higher education and businesses.

dBusinessNews.com is the Nations leading Internet provider of local business intelligence, including news, e-commerce services, business tools, and investment and research resources for small businesses. Through its 70 + local business destination sites in major markets across the United States, dBusinessNews.com is the nation's only comprehensive business resource tool for large, medium and small businesses. Visit http://www.dbusinessnews.com for breaking local news and in-depth local coverage.

Click here to read the article in full: http://sanfrancisco.dbusinessnews.com/shownews.php?newsid=74662&type_news=past

For Banks: Money is Moving

2006-05-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

The Banking Administration Institute (BAI) May/June Newsletter states:

Boston-based research firm Celent LLC has predicted that as much as $150 million in commercial deposits will have migrated to banks offering [remote deposit capture, or] RDC services between mid-2005 and mid-2006.

Article excerpt: The prospects of pushing check imaging from the bank out to a customer's location has sparked the imagination of many financial institutions and their corporate clients. Instead of taking its checks to the branch each day, a customer scans them at its own accounts receivable or remittance processing site, then transmits the digital data directly to the bank and the payments system for clearing. Ready to go today, the process involves no significant technology hurdles and requires minimal infrastructure to be installed by the corporate customer.

ACH Check Conversion Article from The Green Sheet

2006-05-24T10:10:00.000-07:00

So, I had my first e-check transaction last month. That's pretty amazing, considering e-checks (i.e., checks that are converted to electronic payments and cleared through the automated clearing house, or ACH) have been a POS payment option for almost a decade.
- Patti Murphy, Senior Editor of The Green Sheet and President of The Takoma Group

Ms. Murphy interviewed Dave Kvederis, President and Chief Executive Officer of BankServ for the April 24, 2006 issue of The Green Sheet. In the interview, Mr. Kvederis, former Chairman of NACHA, the Electronic Payments Association compares check conversion to the adoption process of ATMs. He bets in 10 years, no businesses will be going to the bank to deposit checks. The article also mentions that at last count, the Fed reported that 37 billion consumer and business checks cleared.

If you're a bank or financial institution, you know that also means at least twice as many transactional messages to go along with those checks as well as the work keeping up with compliance and software routines like OFAC list updates and upgrades.

BankServ manages every part of the electronic payment cycle allowing business customers, member associations and institutions alike the ability to process payments and wire transfers online and over the phone; capture and process check deposits and manage international currency and transactions more fully than anyone on the planet.

Remote Deposit Accounting Software Stand-Alone or Integrated With QuickBooks and Others Helps Banks and Businesses Large and Small

2006-05-19T10:36:00.001-07:00

"This is the hot product in business banking right now. Not only do our business clients no longer need to take their check deposits to a branch, those clients will also have access to their working capital much sooner with faster receipt of funds."

Deborah Bateman, Senior Vice President
National Bank of Arizona, October 17, 2005

That quote is from a white paper released by Canon, a scanner provider and proponent of remote deposit software. The paper succinctly provides a list of remote deposit benefits enabled by Check 21 legislation, summarized here:

Transportation and courier fees are eliminated, as well as clerical and wire consolidation costs to balance deposits
Businesses don't lose time when an employee would leave the office to make a deposit, and recipients don't lose the time it takes for the deposit to process if the check sometimes doesn't make it to the bank (it's lost, there was traffic or bad weather, for instance)
Remote deposit is a more efficient and accurate way to process payments
Businesses are happier because checks clear faster, bad checks identified sooner and vendors can act on orders more quickly because they find the funds have cleared
A business no longer has to consider their office location in relation to a bank branch
Deposits are accepted later in the day, in some cases until 8:00 p.m., after the branch closing
Scanned files can be transmitted 24 x 7 as needed, batched for when processing is available
Banks can offer remote deposit as a value-add to customers, strengthening their customer relationships

BankServ provides a wide range of electronic payment solutions designed for financial institutions, membership-driven organizations and associations and both small business and enterprise, nationally and internationally. In addition to SameDayPay (phone and Web payments) and DepositNow (remote deposit software integrated with QuickBooks and other accounting software), BankServ is quickly reaching leading provider status (currently #2) in electronic financial transaction processing, as the only service bureau in the world to offer both U.S. Fedwire and SWIFT software solutions.