The on-line financial applications and services business has turned out to be rather more complex than one of the experts in both elements, H & R Block Inc, imagined. It has decided that acquiring Meca Software Inc was a mistake, and is selling the money management software unit to a company formed by BankAmerica Corp and NationsBank Corp for about $35m. Meca Software publishes Managing Your Money software, but Block will retain its TaxCut tax preparation software product line. Block bought Meca in November 1993 for about $45.4m, primarily for TaxCut, but also in the belief that Managing Your Money could be useful as a service on its CompuServe on-line network, but the company later concluded that the Managing Your Money business was more of a custom software business than an on-line business, senior vice-president and chief financial officer William Anderson told Reuters. That’s when we decided to sell.
