ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J., April 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Wachovia Mortgage and Palisades Technology Partners today announced that Wachovia, the fourth largest bank holding company in the U.S., successfully launched Palisades' Impact Mortgage Services Suite, a fully automated, web-based loan origination system capable of serving thousands of users.

"Palisades worked extremely well with us as a technology partner and their Impact Loan Processing System delivers a robust lending platform that we integrated tightly into our infrastructure," said Laurie Smith, Director of Lending Technology for Wachovia. "We were up and running within one year; which is a unique accomplishment in this industry with a top lender like ourselves. We are particularly excited about the potential for extending our use of Impacts' components for loan pricing, fee calculations and compliance as web services to further streamline our operations."

"Our Palisades Technology Partners delivered on their promise by providing our employees with an end-to-end fulfillment platform tailored to Wachovia Mortgage business needs. Palisades provides a technology foundation that will enable us to continuously streamline the mortgage originations process," said Tom Wood, Director of Operations for Wachovia's Mortgage Group. "We anticipate doubling our productivity as we roll out Impact across Wachovia Mortgage over the next 24 months. Key features such as work queues, task management, and processing alerts were leveraged to design new business processes, which reduce manual processing steps and deliver a better customer experience."

The project required the development and implementation of interfaces to many downstream systems including Wachovia's in-house POS system using a MISMO like Interface Manager and standard messages over an IBM MQ protocol. The implementation will also facilitate the electronic delivery of documents leveraging Wachovia's Electronic Forms and Image Archive infrastructure. This allows document packages to be routed electronically and retained for review without having to regenerate them.

"We take great pride in our ability to deliver high performance systems rapidly; our success is a testament to Wachovia and Palisades' collaborative approach across a very large implementation team," says Carmine Cacciavillani, President of Palisades Technology Partners. David Aach, COO of Palisades Technology Partners added, "We maintain long term partnerships with all our customers and we look forward to helping Wachovia achieve their business goals through our technology leadership."

About Palisades Technology Partners

Palisades Technology Partners (http://www.ptpusa.com/) provides eLending platform solutions for the retail mortgage origination industry, including Top 100 mortgage lenders. The Top 100 Mortgage Technology Vendor has been serving the mortgage industry for 20 years. Palisades Technology Partners is headquartered in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. For more information, contact Rob Strickland at 201-816-1255 x271 or rstrickland@ptpusa.com.

About Wachovia

Wachovia Corporation (NYSE: WB - News) is one of the largest providers of financial services to retail, brokerage and corporate customers, with retail operations from Connecticut to Florida and west to Texas, and retail brokerage operations nationwide. Wachovia had assets of $506.8 billion, market capitalization of $80.3 billion and stockholders' equity of $46.5 billion at March 31, 2005. Its four core businesses, the General Bank, Capital Management, Wealth Management, and the Corporate and Investment Bank, serve 13 million household and business relationships primarily through 3,277 offices in 15 states and Washington, D.C. Its full-service retail brokerage firm, Wachovia Securities, LLC, also serves clients through 693 offices in 49 states and five Latin American countries. Our Corporate and Investment Bank serves clients primarily in 10 key industry sectors nationwide. Global services are offered through 33 international offices. Online banking and brokerage products and services also are available through Wachovia.com.