Press Release

SIX U.S. FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS SELECT BANKSERV FOR WIRE TRANSFER BUSINESS

June 29, 2000 - SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Six U.S. financial institutions have chosen San Francisco-based BankServ to provide them with its unique wire transfer services. These six holding companies comprise 59 subsidiaries, bringing BankServ’s wire transfer customer total to 109 institutions nationwide.

The six new customer institutions are: AgFirst Farm Credit Bank, based in Columbia, S.C.; BancFirst Corporation of Oklahoma City, Okla.; Guaranty Bank S.S.B. of Milwaukee, Wisc.; Mercantile Safe Deposit and Trust Company of Baltimore, Md.; North Island Federal Credit Union of Chula Vista, Calif.; and PFF Bank & Trust Company of Pomona, Calif. North Island is the first credit union and AgFirst is the first farm credit bank to use the BankServ wire transfer system.

"Wire transfers are a critical product for all financial institutions," said Mike Dionne, vice president and general manager of BankServ's wire transfer unit. "Nearly every house that is sold in this country is settled at the end of escrow with wire transfers, because they are final," he explained. "That finality means, however, that they have to be done correctly and securely the first time. Wire transfer mistakes can cost a bank directly at the bottom line."

Dionne said most smaller financial institutions currently use Fedline, a manual, DOS-based system offered by the Federal Reserve Bank, to conduct their wire transfers, or they hire the wire services of a larger correspondent bank. "Smaller banks need a secure, reliable, cost-effective and easy-to-use system," he added. "It has been our goal to provide that to them."

U.S. financial institutions execute $343 trillion of wire transfers over Fedwire annually, according to the Federal Reserve Bank (http://www.bog.frb.fed.us/PaymentSystems/FedWire/annual.pdf). The average transfer is worth $3.3 million. Electronic funds transfers over $10,000 are regulated by the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and the Federal Reserve.

After only two years in the wire transfer business, BankServ is already one of the country's leading providers of wire transfer outsourcing and licensed software services. Its central data center service, the Global Funds Exchange Network™ (GFXN), currently processes more than $1 billion daily on behalf of its financial institution customers.

Rick Schroeder, vice president of finance and cash management at Guaranty Bank in Milwaukee, said ninety percent of his company's wire transfer business comes from the settlement of home sales. "We have three subsidiaries in more than two dozen states — two mortgage companies and a home equity firm," said Schroeder. "Until now, we had been utilizing the wire system of a correspondent bank. GFXN saves us labor, correspondent bank fees, and gives us online tools to control wire information and security, tools we didn't have before. It will make a tremendous difference." Guaranty has assets of $1.1 billion and over 30 retail branches in Wisconsin and Illinois, as well as three lending subsidiaries, Shelter Mortgage Corporation, GN Mortgage Corporation and GB Home Equity Corporation.

"GFXN will provide us better regulatory compliance with OFAC and BSA regulations than the Fedline service our company now uses," said Jerry Hicks, senior vice president and controller of North Island Federal Credit Union, a $900 million institution in Southern California. "Compliance with those laws is essential for any financial institution."

Protecting financial companies from money launderers is the purpose behind the laws, said Hicks, but those laws also make wire transfers complicated to execute. "GFXN automates those functions for us online," he added, "and it will enable us to grow our wire transfer business without straining our operational resources."

Pam Larsen, cash services manager for AgFirst, the premier agricultural lender in the eastern United States and Puerto Rico, said, "The GFXN wire service will streamline operations and eliminate redundant efforts and manual processes within our wire transfer area. Automating with GFXN will reduce our labor by 75 percent on every wire transfer. GFXN will also give us additional security features and more control than we have now."

AgFirst provides more than $11 billion in loans to more than 85,000 farmers, ranchers and agribusinesses through affiliated financial cooperatives. AgFirst's customers include 32 farmer-owned agricultural credit associations in Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and one production credit association that serves Alabama, Mississippi, and most of Louisiana.

Mercantile Safe Deposit and Trust Company of Baltimore will use a licensed software package version of the GFX system and install it in-house, according to Senior Vice President Patrick Favinger. "BankServ's GFX software allowed us to centralize the wire services of all of our affiliate banks," said Favinger, "and it will enable us to be more responsive to customer inquiries." Mercantile is the largest of 21 community banks in Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. It is wholly owned by Mercantile Bankshares Corporation, a multi-bank holding company with $8 billion in assets headquartered in Baltimore, Md.

Oklahoma’s largest state-chartered bank, BancFirst, has also chosen to install GFX in-house. "We felt BankServ and GFX delivered the best functionality for the investment required," commented Scott Copeland, chief information officer for BancFirst, a $2.4 billion-asset commercial bank that serves 40 communities through more than 70 offices in Oklahoma. "BankServ's reputation with its existing customer base is also very strong," he added.

Michael Sisk, vice president and controller for PFF Bank & Trust in Pomona, Calif., which will use the data center version of GFX, summed up the appraisal of BankServ's wire transfer services this way. "We had a problem, because our wire transfer business was steadily increasing," said Sisk, "but we weren't set up to handle the business without adding a lot more staff. Wire transfers have been very labor-intensive until now. BankServ's automated system enables us to meet that increasing demand, enhance our customer service, and do it for less money than we spend now. That's the bottom line." PFF Bank & Trust is a $3 billion dollar company with 23 branches in Southern California

About GFXN and GFX

The BankServ GFXN and GFX products are electronic funds transfer systems that automate many of the regulatory and operational activities associated with domestic and international wire transfers.

GFXN is a Windows™ -based, data center alternative to the Federal Reserve's Fedline product for domestic and international wire transfers and book entry securities. The service requires no hardware to be installed at the financial institution, and pricing is completely based on transaction fees. BankServ is the only U.S. provider of wire automation solutions in a service bureau environment. Its GFXN service processes more than $1 billion a day in wire transfers.

The GFX solution is the turn-key option of GFXN and can be licensed as a software package by financial institutions who desire to operate this technology in-house. GFX is available in either Windows™ NT or Sun Microsystems Solaris™ 8 Operating Environment versions.

About BankServ

Founded in 1996, San Francisco-based BankServ is one of the country's leading providers of payment solutions for financial services companies, retailers and online businesses. In addition to being a wire transfer service provider, BankServ is also one of the leading check conversion service providers to large and small U.S. banking institutions and to merchants. The company's Internet payments unit offers online wire transfers and electronic checks for Internet business as well as a full suite of security, settlement and reporting applications for both business-to-business exchanges and consumer-to-business payments. Headquartered in San Francisco, BankServ also maintains offices in Atlanta, Boise, Chicago, Dallas, Lafayette, La., Las Vegas and New York.

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