Jody is right, basically it all boils down to web traffic. The portals want to increase traffic to their sites and want to be the default starting point for the internet user. Bill payment would be another logical step for the portals to gain consumer loyalty. If you are an AOL subscriber as an example - when you log in a message might say "you've got mail and bills"
Here is info from the form 10 that should help in understanding the big picture.
In a typical scenario, the Company will analyze a biller's existing billing system and enable the biller to transmit its print stream to the Company for electronic bill processing. The Company will then process the billing information from the biller's print stream and transmit the data to a selected consumer "front end," an Internet website destination where the consumer has chosen to receive bills in an electronic medium. Examples of front ends, also called aggregators, include QuickenTM, MS- MoneyTM, CheckfreeTM, TranspointTM, the biller's website, the consumer's bank website, and Internet portals such as YahooTM, ExciteTM , LycosTM , AOLTM and others. After receiving the bill on its chosen website, the consumer may review and pay the bill by selecting the available payment option on the website. Payment is completed through ACH (Automated Clearing House) transfer of funds as directed by the consumer and
enabled by the consumer's chosen front end.
The Company believes that consumers will increasingly demand to receive and pay their bills over the Internet, particularly at a single front end website individually selected by the consumer. The Company believes it has an advantage in the EBPP market in that it can assist a biller in presenting a bill to any consumer at any Internet website chosen by that consumer. In this regard, the Company functions as a clearinghouse for selected consumer front ends. By contrast, the Company believes that today a biller is forced to either choose one particular consumer front end, and therefore one website, or build its own EBPP capabilities and manage all of the various front end relationships itself, an undertaking which involves considerable time and costs, and displaces the biller's resources from its core business functions.
|
