First USA Takes On Partners To Enhance Product

<I>Dallas</I> - A virtual unknown as a T&E solution provider two years ago, First USA Paymentech is winning over customers with its bottom-line pricing and customizable service options.

Paymentech has signed up the state of Washington, Bandag Tire, Century Telephone and Noble Drilling in recent months. The card processing unit also is pulling talent--including president Jim Baumgartner, senior vice president Mary Francovilla Dees and vice president of client relations Cindy Smith--from competitor First Bank, and new senior vice president of sales David Cramer from GE Capital. A subsidiary of a bank, Paymentech is the third largest processor of bank-card transactions in the United States.

"Our intent is not necessarily to build the largest customer base, but the best customer base," Baumgartner said. "Our business is payment solutions. We're not a bank focused on buying other banks; we're just focused on payment options. We're committed to offering whatever the customer wants."

At First USA Paymentech, those options include linking with any vendor necessary to provide customers with the reporting, automated expense reporting or functionality they need. The foremost example of this is the joint venture with PHH (see story, Page 28). In other partnerships, First USA is using both EDS and ProCard to generate reports for customers. For expense reporting solutions, it has linked with Captura and Travel One's Expense One and is willing to develop download capabilities to any other systems its customers select.

Customizing Software

Looking for ways to provide clients with a financial electronic data interchange package--thus paying electronically rather than with checks--First USA hired Bottomline Technologies, Portsmouth, N.H., to customize its Epic-Enterprise software. First USA intends to distribute the product to clients beginning in April to ease the process of prepopulating expense packages, reconcile card members' transactions and electronically submit them for approval, and automatically generate approved payments to banks and card members via the national Automated Clearing House system. By incorporating payment details, Bottomline has overcome one of the problems of ACH payments, making it easy for corporations to dump payment details into its general ledger, said John Insko, vice president of marketing for Bottomline's electronic commerce division.

The product, as yet unnamed, will carry a market price of $200, according to Heather Fraser, vice president of strategic business development for Paymentech. When integrated with expense reporting software, it offers a fully electronic "cradle-to-grave solution" so many customers are seeking to generate, approve, pay and enter expense data into a general ledger, Fraser said.

Baumgartner cited the bank's reliance on client-server technology--instead of on the mainframes that most banks use--as one of the reasons it can be so agile. The bank also has a Website and is seeking ways to use the Internet to benefit its customers.

And First USA's recent acquisition of GENSAR Holdings Inc., which signs up merchants to accept credit cards, is proving beneficial to the corporate marketplace, according to Cramer. If clients complain about merchants who don't accept the card for payment or don't pass through detailed enough data, Paymentech is now able to approach those merchants and offer solutions to benefit both parties, Cramer said. To ensure that implementations go smoothly, Paymentech recently charged Smith with developing a new unit to coordinate this effort.