BankServ Acquires RDC Provider NetDeposit from Zions Bancorporation

Remote deposit capture and electronic payment provider BankServ announced today it will acquire most of assets and related customer contracts of NetDeposit, LLC. from Salt Lake City-based Zions Bancorporation.

David Keenan, vice president, sales and marketing of BankServ believes the combined operation will be one of the largest privately held, bank-independent processor of remote deposit capture transactions in the nation, with the two companies currently processing a combined 80 million items per month.

"What we’re doing is bringing together two technology platforms – two companies – that complement each other very nicely," he says.

A wholly-owned subsidiary of Zions Bancorporation, NetDeposit has operated as its own entity since 2003. Danne Buchanan, NetDeposit CEO, said the two companies' products are more complementary than in competition.

"Where you’ll find similarities is we both have an RDC product, so there is some overlap there," he adds.

The company will serve more than 500 financial institutions and more than 100,000 business locations with its products in Internet payments, Fedwire, SWIFT, mobile credit card payments, image cash letter processing and check image capture.

Keenan says the deal's genesis is the result of both companies looking at what they believed to be the future of the industry and questioning whether to build for that future from within or through acquisitions.

"We took a look from a bank services perspective at what we were going to need to address that on behalf of our reseller partners," he says. "It kept coming back that NetDeposit had many of those features in place on a world class platform."

BankServ and NetDeposit expect the transition to close within the third quarter of 2010, with a transition period in which the two companies operate in parallel lasting into 2011. BankServ will continue to operate its offices in Las Vegas and London, while maintaining NetDeposit's Salt Lake City office and consolidating NetDeposit's San Mateo, Calif. office into BankServ's San Francisco office.

With the acquisition, Keenan says the company is looking to get products and services out to market as opposed to platform consolidation. The company expects remote deposit capture to continue growing, both for banks and customers.

"We believe that 2011 is going to bring a lot of demand for check depositing out of the home banking platform," he says.