INTERNATIONAL BYTES

Fortis Bank N.V., Belgium, has licensed a money transfer system (MTS) from Intranet Inc., an international provider of enterprise electronic payment solutions

IntraNet's MTS software will provide Fortis high-volume, real-time, mission-critical corporate electronic payment processing that employs enhanced routing logic to maximize the bank's ability to accomplish straight-through processing. Fortis Bank will initially use MTS to integrate its corporate electronic payments and settlement processing and replace a range of existing applications.

"IntraNet's payments solution will enable us to provide our customers with more efficient processing services while supporting their needs in the global e-commerce environment," said Willem Fuchten, global project manager at Fortis Bank. "We will be integrating our disparate payments systems acquired since the consolidation of the Fortis group to strengthen our position in the market."

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The Royal Bank of Trinidad and Tobago (RBT&T), Port of Spain, Trinidad, entered into an eight-year product renewal agreement with ALLTEL.

Under the terms of the agreement, ALLTEL will supply RBT&T with software and services for the bank's lending, deposits and customer information areas. The bank has used ALLTEL's consumer and commercial lending, deposits and customer information offerings and will add the company's advanced lending offering. The additional products will be installed during the next twelve months.

"ALLTEL has provided our organization with a combination of proven products to enable our organization to meet our business objectives," said Hamish Smith, director of corporate resources for Royal Bank of Trinidad and Tobago. "As we expand our relationship and strengthen our leadership position in the region, we look forward to working with ALLTEL as a strategic business partner to meet our business growth goals spanning the entire Caribbean market."

Royal Bank of Trinidad and Tobago has assets exceeding $4 billion and operates a network of 83 branch offices.

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The Brazilian Federation of Private Banks and Caixa Economica Federal has tapped Recall Corporation, Atlanta, to extract the confidential information from bank files necessary to determine the recalculation of monetary awards for citizens' private pension funds from 1989 and 1990.

Recall, a provider of information management solutions, will use its Document Solutions (IDS) technology to generate the digital data from archival physical records, thereby allowing the payment calculations. Recall's solution was accepted as a far more efficient and cost-effective option than manually inputting the data from millions of accounts.

"We are excited to work with the Brazilian government and the Federation of Private Banks in this effort to process those documents and provide an integral solution in this critical process," said Geraldo Cavagnari, vice president and general manager for Recall Latin America.

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Beginning this fall, an estimated 200 students at the University of Economics in Wroclaw, Poland, will use Sanchez Computer Associates Inc.'s Profile integrated banking application to study the modernization of Polish banking.

Students specializing in finance and banking at the university will use Sanchez' Profile banking system in a simulated bank branch environment. They will experience and learn the fundamentals surrounding the back-office and retail delivery functions associated with integrated product and customer information and real-time transaction processing. At the end of the program, students will receive a university certification for work in Poland's financial services industry.

The software was donated to the university through a request made by Marian Noga, an associate professor and the university's chancellor. "As the Polish banking market evolves, the country will require a workforce more familiar with technology," Noga said. "Exposure to working with a modern and integrated banking system that is focused on the customer and can lower operating costs is valuable to the banking education of our students."