This week’s announcement that SourceHOV has merged with BancTec made complete sense from a strategic standpoint-although the announcement admittedly caught us somewhat by surprise. Here’s a true story: I was in Birmingham last week visiting ibml when the topic of BancTec came up. I said I could not figure out why they did not just merge with SourceHOV, especially since they had a common investor after BancTec was acquired by HandsOn3 in February.
BancTec’s story was that HandsOn3 was only a minor investor in SourceHOV and that the plan was to integrate BancTec with the smaller Dataforce, which would create a $300M business combining BancTec’s document capture outsourcing with Dataforce’s call center business. Well, apparently, plans changed. It seemed that others agreed with my thoughts that it made just too much sense to merge BancTec and SourceHOV, which are in a similar market and are both headquartered in Dallas.
SourceHOV, which is actually the result of the merger of the former Lason and SourceCorp that happened in 2011, must have been doing about $600M in annual revenue, as the new organization is being touted as having annual revenue of more than $900M. Here’s a quote from the press release the discussion the complementary nature of the organization’s services operations. ““SourceHOV’s deep domain expertise in healthcare and legal claims processing, alongside BancTec’s 40+ years of banking payment processing know-how, enables the creation of a global powerhouse provider for Transaction Processing Services,” said Ron Cogburn, Chief Executive Officer of SourceHOV and Mark Fairchild, President of BancTec in a joint statement.
As you might guess from the dual-attribution, decisions have not been announced as to who is going to be managing what going forward. Fairchild was only recently appointed president of BancTec in the wake of the acquisition by HandsOn3. Nothing will likely be finalized until the deal closes, which is apparently subject to Hart Scott Rudino review. DIR caught up with Ray Wise, VP Sourcing and Treasury at SourceHOV, who said he doesn’t foresee any problems. The press releases states the closing is expected to happen this year. Wise said SourceHOV would like to close it sooner, but a lot depends on how long the government review takes.
HandsOn3 will become the owner of the entire organization, as it is buying out SourceHOV’s other major shareholder. Related to the transaction, SourceHOV will receive a new $1.1B line of credit.
