Mercury, BancLine, BancPac FIS
This FIS entry deals with its acquired lower-end offerings for the US market, Mercury, BancLine and BancPac, each of which is still a commercial offering.
Mercury
This is targeted at small to mid-tier credit unions and is built on Microsoft technology – Visual Basic, .Net/C#, and SQL. It resides at FIS alongside Miser, which is for larger credit unions and is based on a proprietary Unisys platform. Mercury is intended to cover member management, new account opening, deposit and loan account servicing, financial management, reporting, operations functions, fraud management, compliance and service delivery. There are 180 standard reports and, of course, a host of other applications that are sold by FIS around the core, such as e-banking, EFT processing, credit bureau inquiry, collections and loan origination. The hosted version is branded as Mercury-On-Demand. There are also Mercury mortgage, loan participations, and commercial accounts modules.
BancLine and BancPac
Aurum’s item processing business looked to be an attraction for FIS, alongside the other applications. This may have been the same reason Norcross, Georgia-based Intercept was acquired, in Q4 2004, as it processed checks for 720 community banks. The deal was valued at around $419.4 million. With this, Fidelity added two more core systems to its portfolio, Windows NT- based BancPac, sold as either an in-house system or as a service bureau offering (and branded in the past as PC BancPac), and BancLine, with the latter including availability on Unix. The roots of BancPac go back to the late 1970s/early 1980s. Intercept’s offerings had been fleshed out through a number of relatively small acquisitions of its own over the years. Intercept was set up in 1986 with an initial focus as an EFT
processor for ATMs aimed at the community bank sector. When it added BancPac, one of the companies it started to compete with was Aurum. The company went public in mid-1998, at which time it had annual revenues of around $23 million and claimed to have a full suite of offerings for community banks. Annual revenue had risen to $47 million in 1999. Having worked with the Bankers’ Bank in Georgia (which served local community banks), it gained relationships with
60 FIS gained Mercury via the acquisition of Texas-based
Aurum Technology. Aurum, which already had Miser, had itself bought the Mercury system less than a year earlier (March 2003), with Computer Consultants (or CCCorp), which for 20 or so years had provided processing services to credit unions. Computer Consultants had been founded in 1977 by Hugh Butler and had 57 full-time staff by the time it was sold. Butler remained with FIS until April 2007. Salt Lake City, UT-based Computer Consultants had started with a DOS-based system called Director; Mercury was the Windows-based successor to this, launched in 2001. FIS put additional R&D into Mercury and it came to reside with Miser and the rest of the product set. At the time of the takeover, the conversion of customers from Director to Mercury was in full swing, with 250 credit unions having moved by early 2005 and a similar number still to go.
other such banks across the country. By 2000, Intercept claimed over 1500 financial institutions as customers and it was the largest third party processor of ATM transactions in the south eastern US. BancLine was acquired by Intercept in January 2001 with the $40 million acquisition of
SLMsoft.com Inc, which also had check imaging and item processing operations. SLMsoft had, in turn, bought the BancLine business with BancLine MidWest Inc in late 1998.
When seeking to sell BancLine today, FIS focuses on its
relational database and parameter-based features. There is a general ledger, with support for deposits, (savings, certificates of deposit and individual retirement accounts), consumer and commercial loans (origination and processing), and also a Windows-based teller, TellerPlus. For BancPac, FIS emphasizes its ease of use and cost-
effectiveness. It covers customer information file, common deposit accounts, certificates of deposit and individual retirement accounts, common loan accounts, general ledger and financial management. TellerPlus forms the branch front-end for this system as well. FIS seems to have moved forwards with BancPac, with R&D going into the product over the years.
US Financial Services Technology Market Report |
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