Outsourcing at Work - HTI Founder Experiences in Transaction Processing

Horizontech, Inc. is in the business of generating solutions to clerical or technology processing problems for corporate clients. These solutions are characterized by three elements that are core to HTI’s business: providing clients with access to leading edge technology, including imaging, telecommunications and database management with an Internet based orientation; integrating processing functions in order to minimize layers of management and facilitate monitoring by client; providing creativity and customization rather than just a stock answer; leveraging scale and world-wide labor pools of clerical expertise to lower costs without sacrificing quality.

As the following cases show, HTI’s founder brings to his clients a strategic partner who understands their business and will work with them over the long term.

Corporate Finance & Administration: Mobil Oil Credit Corporation

Some farsighted companies caught on to outsourcing well before the current wave started. Mobil Oil hired the founder’s former company over 25 years ago to handle its remittance processing. The founder, as senior executive for that business unit, built that business to become the largest remittance processor in the U.S. by the mid-90’s. Later Mobil Oil expanded its outsourcing to include MasterCard and Visa processing, as well as check authorization, verification, and guarantee.

In the mid-1990’s, Mobil became the first oil company to offer its customers the opportunity to pay bills over the Internet using a product called VirtualPAY, which minimizes the number of people who have access to transaction information, thereby offering advantages over paying in person, by mail or over the telephone.

As a result of its outsourcing relationship, Mobil has speeded its collections and obtained customized reporting. Through VirtualPAY it now provides an affluent market with a high-visibility collection channel - one that promotes customer loyalty by offering convenience and payment flexibility. Since 1996, thousands of Mobil customers have paid bills using VirtualPAY, with the number increasing monthly. The founder of Horizontech has since created XperTran® payment processing system as a next generation capability in this arena.

Airline Ticket Processing and Fare Audit : U.S. Airways & Air Canada

The founder in the early 1990’s connected with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and created a service offering to airline customers. This service offering consisted of the airline outsourcing the mailroom, imaging and data capture of information from its sales and “lift” passenger tickets. In addition, using software developed by Andersen Consulting, the system was able to audit the fares against contractual obligations between the airlines and travel agents, saving a medium sized airline approximately $30-40 million per year in overcharges by travel agents. The initial customer set included U.S. Airways and Air Canada. They helped define the service concept, including determining with the providers which functions were best suited to remain in-house and which would be outsourced.

That service offering was marketed to other airlines in the 1990’s and resulted in over a 50% market-share of U.S. airlines adopting that outsourcing approach.

Pension Plan Records Image Conversion & Indexing - Calpers

HTI processed over 200,000 image files per day as part of a 48,000,000 record conversion effort over 12 months. Imaging and indexing included de-skew, cleanup activities, document rotation and merging according to customer specifications. Indexing captured key information about the pension fund members and creation of DLT tapes enabled archiving of large amounts of data while the image database system was being developed and loaded.