May I have the envelope please? And the top five winners are.........

By Art Gillis

1. Digital Insight 112% 2. Online Resources Corp. 58% 3. Open Solutions Inc. 54% 4. ACI Worldwide 39% 5. CheckFree 37%

This is the only game I play in the 400+ pages of my annual research report, Automation in Banking - 2006. Because there are 24 public companies profiled out of 108 bank tech vendors, I like to show the performance of those companies in terms of the price of their stock. The period is tax day 2005 to tax day 2006. Even though there are 24 public companies, only 15 really influence the price of the stock. Here's what I mean. Harland Financial Solutions is a bank tech company, but John Harland is a check printer. So even though JH stock went up 42%, it's hard to make a case that HFS was the reason. To carry this example further, it's probably even harder to figure out why a check printer should generate higher returns for its stockholders in what is rapidly becoming an electronic payments world. But as I said, that's why this is a game.