Fiserv Inc. said last week that it would merge its interactive technologies unit, which developed its Advantage Fee billing system for banks and money managers, into its CheckFree investment services unit.
Cheryl Nash, the senior vice president of strategy, marketing, and product development in the CheckFree unit, said it would integrate Advantage Fee, which has 70 clients, including institutional investors and wealth management companies, into the CheckFree APL portfolio accounting service.
"The product fits well within our wealth management solutions," she said in an interview last week, because APL does not have a billing module like Advantage Fee.
Fiserv, a Brookfield, Wis., financial technology company, bought CheckFree Corp. in December. Ms. Nash said Advantage Fee, a packaged software application, would be integrated into the APL hosted service this year.
CheckFree has changed its approach to the transformation of APL, which manages nearly 2.6 million investment portfolios, she said. The company had previously planned to replace APL's command-line interface with a point-and-click front end that it bought last May with Upstream Technologies LLC in Boston, a developer of online tools for asset managers.
Rather than rewriting the APL system wholesale, CheckFree is taking an iterative, "progressive migration" approach, and Advantage Fee will be part of that, she said.
