The new free-standing Lucent Technologies Inc and Visa International have got together in Lucent’s first foray into the world of on-line banking (CI No 3,018). Lucent split from its former role as AT&T Corp’s telecommunications equipment and chip- making arm last month. The company says it expects to grow faster than its competitors in the telecommunications equipmnet market’s coming years, with the biggest growth coming from the Asia- Pacific region. And now the company has linked its Intuity Conversant voice-response system with Visa Interactive’s electronic banking network using Visa’s Access Device Messaging specification. The software is available now to any Visa-member financial institutions throughout the US, and will be available internationally some time next year. The first to take up the offer is UMB Financial Corp in Kansas City, Missouri, which is planning to make the bill payment service available to its 130 full-service banking centres throughout the mid-west. The features the system offers include round-the-clock banking, advance payment scheduling, low-funds notification, and access to the system from any touch-tone telephone. The new on-line banking software starts at $6,700 for small- and medium-sized banks that already have Intuity Conversant 5.0 installed. For those banks that require both the hardware and software the package starts at $18,000 and large bank applications start at $30,000. Lucent projects telecommunications equipment industry growth of $1bn over the next three years, and the company says that its business communications systems business is growing at a rate of 45% in the Asia-Pacific region, with expectations that it will be growing at 60% by year-end.
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