Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you sir. (Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Ashwin Shirvaikar - Citigroup Investment.
Ashwin Shirvaikar - Citigroup Investment
The first question is, the core bidding service that you guys provided, that’s relatively stable for the managed services part of it, but it also includes like you mentioned the marketing services portion of that can be discretionary. But can you actually break out what proportion of the owe it all is this kind of marketing service? And also for the acquisitions that you made over the past couple of years, could you go through a sort of similar exercise of discretionary versus required?
Randy R. Wiese
I would say Ashwin we typically don’t break that out into the various components of the processing revenues, so that information is not available. I would say that as I said in my comments, we have good visibility in terms of our revenues each year of about 90% which includes revenues under contract, and it’s dependent upon the continued usage of some of the items such as statement production. So we feel very good about the 90%. The remaining 10% that you’re referring to is very discretionary in nature.
It’s generally special projects. It can be additional marketing services and things of that nature; software and professional services.
Peter E. Kalan
I guess just to first follow-up on the first component where there is discretionary spending, we believe that many of the discretionary spend dollars that our clients have do generate value for them, whether it’s the marketing services where they’re sending messages to their consumers, either on their behalf or a third party’s, we believe that there is value that’s derived from it. And there would be an impact to their business. But we don’t project to say that our clients may have to think about some of those things as they run their business in 2009.
But we still have a fairly good confidence on many of what we view as the discretionary items that they have, based on the success of those components we’ve brought to their business in the past. Relative to the acquisitions, if you think about Dataprose and [contect] that we acquired in the last 12 to 24 months, much of that business is associated with sending out core invoices to customers on behalf of service providers. We believe that’s very sustainable. We don’t believe there’s a lot of discretionary income in those businesses that we have in those parts of our business.
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