SECTOR: E-COMMERCE ENABLERS
A nice summary ............
The Cast Of Players
There are so many players vying to play a vital role in electronic bill
presentment, it is sometimes difficult to keep them all straight. Most,
however, can be put into one of several categories:
1) Bill presentment aggregators. Industry observers point to two
major players—CheckFree Corp. and TransPoint, the joint venture
formed by Microsoft Corp., First Data Corp. and Citibank. Both sign up
billers, banks and others and then consolidate the biller data to be
presented on central sites.
2) Banks. There are two sides to banks' interest in bill presentment:
retail banking and cash management. Retail bankers want their
customers to come to their sites to view and then pay bills. They want
to use bill presentment to spur their other electronic services and
enhance their image with consumers. Bankers on the cash
management side want to keep their relationships, and related revenue,
with big corporate clients rather than lose them to the aggregators.
3) Billers. Many billers want to post their bills on their own Web sites.
But most are also expected to post their bills through aggregators
either on bank or other sites. Many banks are also included in this
category because they send out a considerable number of credit card
bills, mortgage and loan notices and other bills.
4) Bill service bureaus. They are hired by billers to develop and
manage the billers' electronic bill presentment and payment programs.
They maintain the Web servers and oversee the programs. Some also
transfer the funds associated with payment. Companies involved
include Princeton TeleCom Corp., CyberCash Inc. and International
Billing Services. While these firms often cooperate with aggregators by
handing off the data from biller clients to be presented by the
aggregators, they sometimes compete with the aggregators in
processing the payments or in convincing a biller to use them to set up
the service.
5) Bill software developers. Unlike the service bureaus, these
companies don't develop e-bills for billers, but rather give billers the
technology to do it themselves. Competitors include edocs Inc., Oracle
Inc., BlueGill Technologies Inc., Just In Time Solutions Inc. and
Brinkman Technologies Inc. There are also specialty companies like
Mobius Corp., which develops software for billers to archive their
electronic bills.
6) Home banking technology firms. These companies integrate the
bill presentment application software into the home banking software or
services they sell to banks. Competitors include Edify Corp., Home
Financial Network, CFI ProServices Inc., Corilion Corp., Digital Insight,
First Data Direct Banking, InteliData Technologies Corp., Online
Resources & Communications Corp., M&I Data and a number of
others. Most of these firms have alliances with aggregators.
7) Portal sites and brokerage firms. In addition to banks, financial
service sites such as Yahoo! Finance, Microsoft's MoneyCentral, Intuit
Inc.'s Quicken.Com, Netscape's NetCenter and others are expected to
serve as locations where customers can get all their bills. Additionally,
many online brokerages that offer money market accounts are likely to
perform bank-like roles by consolidating bills for their customers.
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