Recently announced, PULSE, a Discover Financial Services (DFS) company reported strong results for its fiscal year 2011. The company increased its market acceptance at more than 380,000 ATMs worldwide in 2011, increasing 8.6% annually. It also added around 129 direct financial institution participants in the full year to its vast network.
Furthermore, PULSE increased its total transaction volume by 16% year over year to a whopping 3.8 billion and also proliferated its total dollar volume by 19% annually to $140 billion.
There were some approbatory highlights of 2011, which led the company to report such impressive figures. Pulse is credited with its advancement of Internet PIN debit which would now include recurring payment and subscription-based bill payment options along with ameliorations in the DebitProtect fraud system with custom fraud-alert rules.
The company also managed to successfully shift towards HP NonStop Blade server technology from its existing debit processing and development platforms during the year, not to mention the laudatory launch of DebitSavvy.org website catering to customers’ debit card usage facilities.
Not long ago, PULSE launched its new Debit Amendment Resource Center catering to formulation and provision of rules and regulations with regard to debit card legislations. This would directly benefit financial institutions, merchants and acquirers in the economy.
PULSE also proclaimed the signing of a long-term point of sale (POS) and ATM acceptance agreement contract with NETS, Inc. (NetWorks) to provide its PIN debit transaction services to the latter. Such progressive advances have had quite a favorable impact on the company’s financial position as we can lucidly see.
Management has provided an optimistic outlook for fiscal 2012 owing to the positive demand winds and its incipient growth in goodwill. It noted that the company is increasing its global market database with both, large and small financial institution clients which assures the company of yet another strong performance in 2012.
We believe that the recent advancements of PULSE shall have a positive effect on the financial position of its parent company, Discover Financial Services. At present we have an Outperform recommendation on Discover. The stock currently carries a Zacks #1 Rank, which translates into a short-term rating of Strong Buy.
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