develop, market and support billing software and ancillary products for the banking and investment advisory industries. The company is a unit of Fiserv, Inc. (Nasdaq:FISV), with offices in Summit, NJ (home office), Seattle and London, England.

With successful companies ranging in AUM from several hundred thousand to the area of $1 trillion US, all in need of accurate billing and reporting, a system must be designed for adaptability. Over time Advantage has been reconfigured and repriced several times to allow its use by almost any bank or asset manager. The software is offered currently on three tiers, each with options that allow users to purchase only what they need, with the opportunity to add modules later as required. The core code of all these systems is the same, which means that the degree of accuracy and flexibility in regard to billing rules ("fee schedules") is in no way restricted for any user.

All systems offer Billing, Accounts Receivable and Accruals modules, and include basic reports. Additional reports packages are available to the larger systems, and users can also construct ad hoc reports with standard tools.

As receivables were being tracked, financial officers were finding that a surprising percentage of their revenues were not being billed. Off record estimates ran as high as 6-8%. Our response was to develop a generic billing system. The cornerstone was great flexibility with regard to fee schedules, because it was primarily the inability to process complex fee schedules that caused the losses.

First JP Morgan, then Continental Bank bought this original DOS Advantage system. When Citibank and Mellon Shareholders Services came on board, the company dropped all other activities to focus on billing.

To keep the system up to speed with the industry, a policy of shared development costs emerged: Interactive would reserve the right to genericize all useful enhancements developed for individual clients for inclusion in subsequent releases, and these upgrades would be available at no cost to users other then time and materials for conversion. Shared code and costs have produced unmatched functionality at low cost.

Two other policies were also adopted: Advantage would embrace billing for all securities products, and additional capabilities would be added through ancillary modules and interfaces to other billing-related software. Reporting became a priority because billing was being redesigned in terms of revenue analysis and administration. Financial officers wanted more information, and that information came together only in a billing system. This area is consistently expanding through reports we create and interfaces to other software.

Transaction volumes escalated in the late nineties as a result of mergers and consolidated billing, resulting in Version 4, with robust client/server Windows NT architecture. It featured much higher throughput and more precise revenue administration. Beta tested with a large and respected investment advisory company, Version 4 was intended to meet the needs of this field as well as that of banking, and did so, as indicated by our client list.