NCR goes omni-channel in financial services

NCR is now on a significant spending spree, acquiring companies that fill out is objective of providing banks and other financial and retail service providers with a single transaction management platform that can service all transaction types, running across all popular forms of delivery channel.  

The latest component in this plan has reached the stage of NCR announcing a definitive agreement to acquire online and mobile banking solutions provider, Digital Insight Corporation, for a purchase price of $1.65 billion. It has also now completed the acquisition of Alaric Systems, a provider of secure transaction switching and fraud prevention software, for a purchase price of approximately $84 million.

“This is a historic day for NCR”

Together, these companies complement and extend NCR’s existing capabilities in the banking industry to form a complete enterprise software platform that will deliver a comprehensive, omni-channel consumer experience across all digital and physical channels - mobile, online, branch, and ATM – and all transaction types. The combination is aimed at helping retail banks and other financial institutions reduce legacy costs and enable solutions for new, more nimble branches.

Today’s announcement follows the previous acquisitions of Retalix and Radiant Systems that have transformed NCR’s Retail and Hospitality businesses by delivering revenue growth, improved profitability, and an increased revenue mix of software and SaaS for NCR.

The acquisitions of Digital Insight and Alaric Systems continue a strategic plan of transformative acquisitions across all of the company’s three core lines of business. It is intended to help NCR deliver one of the most comprehensive suites of retail banking solutions available.

"This is a historic day for NCR," said NCR chairman and CEO, Bill Nuti. "For the past eight years, NCR has been executing a deliberate and thoughtful strategic agenda to profoundly reinvent the company. Over that time, we have orchestrated a patient balance between legacy issues and growth initiatives that has led to delivering a compelling value proposition for all of our stakeholders. Today, we are fundamentally and permanently changing our largest line of business, Financial Services."

The addition of Digital Insight gives NCR the ability to serve the mid-market retail banking segment, which includes Digital Insight’s highly diversified customer base consisting of more than 1,000 financial institutions with 12 million online banking users and nearly 4.8 million mobile end users. The acquisition will also provide an opportunity for NCR to offer its clients additional solutions for mobile, bill pay and online banking.

“Together, NCR, Digital Insight and Alaric Systems are committed to delivering value to financial institutions," said Andy Heyman, senior vice president, NCR Financial Services. "We have an opportunity to enable differentiated consumer experiences through safe, secure, and integrated transactions across every banking touch point. We will help financial institutions to reduce costs, serving as a single solutions provider for ATM, branch, mobile, commerce and internet banking services, as well as the payments and processing infrastructure behind those experiences.”

Alaric Systems payments processing and fraud prevention software allows financial institutions, processors and retailers to manage ATM, point of sale, ecommerce and mobile payment or banking transactions, deliver complex multi-channel payments integration and carry out enterprise fraud and risk management. Alaric Systems runs more than 1.25 billion transactions a month across 30 countries.

It includes the Authentic payments and Fractals fraud prevention technologies. Authentic is a high-performance authorisation and routing system for managing transactions from all channels across the enterprise, while Fractals is an intelligent fraud detection and prevention framework designed to detect and intercept fraudulent payment transactions before the transaction is completed.