Sovereign Re-ups with First Data for Merchant Processing

Sovereign Bank has renewed a merchant-processing contract with First Data Corp., the Denver-based processor has announced. The five-year deal represents an extension of Sovereign Merchant Services, which was established in 2001 as one of a number of alliance agreements First Data has concluded with banks in which FDC provides merchant-transaction processing. Sovereign Bank, which serves 27,185 merchant locations in the New England and mid-Atlantic markets, processed 73 million transactions worth $5.3 billion through FDC in 2004. The institution is the 18th-largest bank in the U.S. All told last year, FDC processed 12.2 billion merchant transactions, including credit card, debit card, gift card, and check-verification and -guarantee traffic.