With the acquisition of Gilson Payments, we began a new chapter in our long history by adding Payments to our high-performance Teller, Sales & Service, Lending, and Performance Management solutions. Now, ARGO solutions incorporate payments image capture, reconciliation, settlement/exchange, and fraud detection with staff who are payments industry experts.
Much of our success in driving synergies, expanding revenue, reducing costs, and increasing productivity stems from ARGO’s natural linkage of technology, deployment processes, operational support, and banking competencies.
One example of this success is the new ARGO Early Detection Monitoring Service (EDMS), which provides real-time monitoring of ARGO solutions in customers’ operations. This service allows us to more effectively serve our customers’ operational support needs.
ARGO customers generated the idea for EDMS because they needed support for the increasing scale of their delivery networks. The service, which monitors operations across 35 states for 6 customers, improves operational reliability by predicting risk factors and reducing discovery times.
Another success story involves our integration of payment image capture, reconcilement, and exchange. This major enhancement allows ARGO customers to enter a paperless Check 21 era, driving both cost reductions and customer experience benefits.
Throughout the past year, we substantially enhanced our ability to develop beneficial solutions. Across all ARGO business lines, we help our customers achieve their goals of improving productivity, expanding revenue, and improving customer and employee satisfaction. Our eLearning business unit expedites training through automation innovation that allows customers to reduce training costs while improving education effectiveness. Our credit business unit strengthens its risk assessment capability for both consumer and business credit by examining through-the-door lending results, providing early feedback on credit risk trends, and assuring appropriate risk-based pricing.
While we are not immune to the economic volatility and market disruptions the financial services sector is experiencing, our sound and prudent financial management history has served us and our customers well. Our emphasis on strong balance sheet governance allows us to continue to build value for our customers.
The ARGO fiscal year ended with revenue declining 13 percent—a reflection of the economy—but our balance sheet remains strong with assets of $162 million and no debt. This structure ensures ARGO has no liquidity risk that might impede innovative research and development. In fact, this year we increased new development and invested in talent—with both internal and acquisition initiatives—for solutions and processes that have an impact on customer experience, employee productivity, fraud detection and prevention, time to market, and analytics.
I know our 250 ARGO employees share my pride in building a company that plays a vital role in the financial services industry. By positioning ourselves at the intersection of financial services’ trends, we are prepared to capitalize on future change that benefits our customers using ARGO Payments, Teller, Sales & Service, Lending, and Performance Management product lines. Next year, we will continue to be credible on the basics, understand customer strategies and pain points, be proactive, retain funds for research and development, and invest in high-value talent.
