SourceCorp, BancTec Merger Makes Sense

This week's announcement that SourceHOV has merged with BancTec made complete sense from a strategic standpoint-although the announcement admittedly caught us somewhat by surprise. Here's a true story: I was in Birmingham last week visiting ibml when the topic of BancTec came up. I said I could not figure out why they did not just merge with SourceHOV, especially since they had a common investor after BancTec was acquired by HandsOn3 in February.

BancTec's story was that HandsOn3 was only a minor investor in SourceHOV and that the plan was to integrate BancTec with the smaller Dataforce, which would create a $300M business combining BancTec's document capture outsourcing with Dataforce's call center business. Well, apparently, plans changed. It seemed that others agreed with my thoughts that it made just too much sense to merge BancTec and SourceHOV, which are in  a similar market and are both headquartered in Dallas.

SourceHOV, which is actually the result of the merger of the former Lason and SourceCorp that happened in 2011, must have been doing about $600M in annual revenue, as the new organization is being touted as having annual revenue of more than $900M. Here's a quote from the press release the discussion the complementary nature of the organization's services operations. " “SourceHOV’s deep domain expertise in healthcare and legal claims processing, alongside BancTec’s 40+ years of banking payment processing know-how, enables the creation of a global powerhouse provider for Transaction Processing Services,” said Ron Cogburn, Chief Executive Officer of SourceHOV and Mark Fairchild, President of BancTec in a joint statement.

As you might guess from the dual-attribution, decisions have not been announced as to who is going to be managing what going forward. Fairchild was only recently appointed president of BancTec in the wake of the acquisition by HandsOn3. Nothing will likely be finalized until the deal closes, which is apparently subject to Hart Scott Rudino review. DIR caught up with Ray Wise, VP Sourcing and Treasury at SourceHOV, who said he doesn't foresee any problems. The press releases states the closing is expected to happen this year. Wise said SourceHOV would like to close it sooner, but a lot depends on how long the government review takes.

HandsOn3 will become the owner of the entire organization, as it is buying out SourceHOV's other major shareholder. Related to the transaction, SourceHOV will receive a new $1.1B line of credit.

What Ray Rice & Donald Sterling can Tell Us about the Future of Capture

For those of you who attended the Harvey Spencer Associates (HSA) Capture Conference last week, you got to see a cool presentation by HP Autonomy's Christopher Surdak on doing automated capture from video files. Examples that Surdak presented included matching license plate numbers with car models to protect against stolen vehicles and analyzing faces taken on video at airports for matches against dangerous persons databases.These aren't exactly examples of the transaction-oriented capture that HSA typically focuses on, but you can see where it could lead. Harvey likes to give the example of being able to take a video of a car engine that is not working right, and sending that video to the cloud - where analysis is done and then the user is sent a list of parts that they can order to fix the problem.


In DIR's annual news review and predictions presentation, I offered my opinion that as millennials and born digitals take over the workforce and smart phones and other computers continue to advance, videos and photos are going to become increasingly important to conducting business. Traditional documents are destined to become so yesterday.

A recent sports news story helps bring the point home about how much more powerful video cam be as a means of communication than traditional text. Many of you have by now surely heard the story of Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens running back that has been driven out of football due to his being caught beating up his fiancee this past offseason. Here's the timeline:

• Story comes out about Rice beating up girlfriend/fiancee. 
• Rice gets suspended for two games.
• People get up in arms about the light punishment and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell stiffens NFL's domestic abuse policy - but nothing more happens to Rice
• Video comes out showing what Rice admitted to
• Rice's team (Baltimore Ravens) terminate his contract and league suspends him indefinitely

 From this ESPN story on the Rice incident: "The source said that Rice admitted to the Ravens from the start that he was guilty of striking Janay and, for the most part, accurately described what they eventually saw on the video. But the brutality of the assault when seen on the security video made a different impression."

So, basically, until everybody actually saw what Rice was doing, the full impact of the event was not realized. As a text-oriented guy, this kind of disturbs me, because I really wasn't surprised by the video and had a hard time believing many people are just now becoming outraged with Rice's behavior. But then again, we had a similar situation with Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling earlier this year.

If you remember, Sterling was essentially driven out of the NBA after a recording surfaced with him making racial comments to his ex-girlfriend. Shocking right? Well, not so much.  As far back as 2006, Bomani Jones wrote this article for ESPN's Page 2, entitled "Sterling's Racism Should be News." In spite of this, big name athletes and Coach Doc Rivers continued to sign with the Clippers from 2006 through 2013. Then, they acted all surprised when his racist rants were caught on audio recording this spring.

The bottom line is that apparently, nobody in the mass market pays attention to text media anymore. Which brings me back to my point about multi-media being so much more powerful than text. Maybe traditional documents still have a place in business today, just like there is still print/text media out there being published. But as things move more toward video, audio, and the like in mass media, I don't think there is any question they will also move that way in business transactions. Didn't Blackberry rule the business world before iPhones took over the consumer market and then moved into business? The momentum in favor of video is just too great. Expect more video in business in the next few years!

10 Years of Capture Market Evolution

On my way to Harvey Spencer Associates Capture 2014 Conference, where I will be presenting for the 10th straight year. The industry has certainly evolved quite a bit in that time, as has the content of the conference. Here's a look at the agenda for this year's event. Here's an article I did previewing this special 10th anniversary edition of the event.

My presentation this year reflects the history of the conference, as Harvey has asked me to take a look back at how the market has evolved since 2005. I have a fairly detained presentation (that will be delivered in 15 minutes or so, so it will be action packed), but here's a preview of one slide, which includes what I consider to be the five biggest capture trends in the past 10 years:

1. Consolidation of Capture with ECM
2. Aggressive Movement of Hardware Vendors into Capture Software & Services
3. Emergence of Mobile & Cloud Technologies
4. SharePoint’s Emergence as an ECM Platform
5. Acceptance of Distributed Capture

 That's just a teaser. Lot more to come in my preso, such as a fairly detailed list of all the major M&A activity in capture market over past 10 years and my opinion on what it tells us.

Cheers.

Kofax Aquires Digital Signature Specialist

Kofax, in an interesting move to continue to beef up its "First Mile" and smart process application (SPA) technology portfolio, acquired digital signature specialist Softpro. Headquartered in Boeblingen, in southwestern Germany, Softpro had revenue of $13.3M in 2013, and Kofax is paying $34.7M in cash, so that a valuation of over 2.5x revenue and more than 34x profit, as Softpro reported an EBITDA of $1M for 2013.

From a technology standpoint,  the acquisition a great fit. As Kofax transitions from paper toward capturing more types/channels of electronic information, digital signature technology is a natural way to extend its portfolio. Softpro actually has two types of digital signature technology - both of which dovetail nicely in to the Kofax technology stack. The majority of Softpro's revenue comes from enterprise e-signature technology packaged under the SignDoc brand. Softpro also has strong signature fraud detection technology, branded FraudOne, which is utilized by many large banks.

SoftPro fits nicely into Kofax's emerging smart process application (SPA) play.  For example, Grant Johnson, Kofax's CMO explained to DIR, how it's a natural fit with Kofax's recently announced Mortgage Agility solution. "E-signatures really helped facilitate digital business and transactions," said Johnson.

"It's a great fit for any SPA where there is customer onboarding and it's essential for a signature to be part of the documentation," added Dave Caldera a senior VP with Kofax.

While FraudOne has its place within an SPA hierarchy, it's also a nice traditional capture add-on. In addition to being used for checks, the technology can also be utilized for applications like verifying signatures on contracts. (Coincidentally, Parascript, which recently announced a FormXtra for Kofax Capture module, has touted success in similar types of applications.)

Bottom line is that Kofax paid a bit of a premium to increase its footprint of multi-channel capture/SPA technologies. Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish has said that he will not buy capture market share- and Kofax certainly is not doing that. Instead, as with its other recent acquisitions, with Softpro, Kofax is buying technologies that complement its strong traditional document capture stack and help it evolve as the market continues to increasingly embrace digital transactions over paper ones. I think the M&A landscape has shown that the more digital-transaction-oriented a vendor is, the higher valuation it will achieve.