U.S. Bank buys freight payment competitor

U.S. Bank buys freight payment competitor U.S. Bank said it has purchased privately held AIMS Logistics to expand its freight audit and payment service, known as PowerTrack.
   The financial services firm is the second-largest provider of electronic billing, pre-payment audit and settlement services for the freight industry in North America.
   AIMS Logistics’ strength is in Europe and it processes billions of transactions from operations centers in Collierville, Tenn.; Brussels; Mumbai, India; and Sydney, Australia.
   Last year, U.S. Bank made a big splash with the acquisition of Schneider Logistics’ freight payment unit in North America. But Schneider held onto part of the unit that provides billing services in Europe and Mexico.
   PowerTrack is an entirely electronic network that retrieves bills of lading from a shipper’s internal system and matches it with freight carrier’s delivery and invoice information to search for mistakes from the contracted rates, duplicate charges and whether service levels were met. U.S. Bank can also separately handle paper invoices.