Boosted by an 11% lift in revenues, CheckFree has narrowed losses for the second quarter and raised expectations for fiscal 2004 earnings.
The US-based e-commerce outfit posted a net loss of $1.9 million for the second quarter, compared to $11.2 million for the same quarter last year, as Q2 revenues surged to $149.9 million. Underlying earnings, excluding write-offs and charges, rose to $23.4 million from $17.7 million for the comparative period.
Pete Kight, CheckFree chairman and CEO says: "We experienced strong transaction growth, reflecting positive gains by many Consumer Service Providers who take advantage of our full service processing capabilities and saw nice gains in electronic bill delivery and portfolios under management."
The company reports that its Electronic Commerce unit processed more than 139 million transactions for the quarter, a 10% increase over the previous quarter; delivered 18.5 million electronic bills, an increase of 26% over the previous quarter; and increased its electronic rate by two full percentage points to 78%. In Investment Services, portfolios under management increased to about 1.4 million. In its Software business, CheckFree signed five financial services clients for its PEP+ reACH solution, which supports electronic cheque conversion for merchants of those banks. The company also acquired the assets of financial middleware vendor Heliograph.
CheckFree CFO David Magnum says the company has increased full-year expectations for earnings per share to $0.04 to $0.08 on a GAAP basis, or $0.99 to $1.03 on an underlying basis.
"These expectations include the performance we anticipate from our Heliograph acquisition," he says.