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Date: 06/26 00:30 EST
Banks Team To Boost Online Billing -- Chase, First Union, Wells Fargo To Route Bills Via The Net
Jun. 25, 1999 (InformationWeek - CMP via COMTEX) -- Chase Manhattan,
First Union, and Wells Fargo last week revealed plans to form a new
company to expand online billing options by creating a system for
routing bills to customers via the Internet.
The company, tentatively called the Exchange LLC, will build a secure
infrastructure based on a standard called open financial exchange and
will operate a central directory of consumers and the electronic bills they receive. The goal is to give the three founding member banks and others that join the system a way to handle electronic statements from merchants who use proprietary bill presentment technology from either TransPoint LLC or CheckFree Corp. Banks currently need two separate interfaces to do that.
"The Exchange is similar to the ATM network," says Sharon Osberg,
senior VP of online financial services at Wells Fargo, referring to the automated teller machine system that lets a person withdraw money from any ATM regardless of where their bank account is located. The Exchange will begin testing this week, and all three banks aim to present electronic bills over it by October.
Sun Microsystems will provide software, hardware, and integration
services at a data center that sources say will be operated by Visa
USA. The data center will use the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol to keep track of consumers and bills issued by companies.
"The Exchange is the middleware or the middle piece," says June
Felix, senior VP of E-commerce at Chase Manhattan. "On each end point, there's choice and flexibility for our customers," she says, referring to billers and consumers. "We think that the Exchange is the missing link that's going to seed this market going forward."
Consumers in areas where online bill presentment is widely available
haven't rushed to take advantage of it. One reason, analysts say, is
most banks are charging for the service. Another problem is that
merchants must still wrestle with the lack of interoperability between CheckFree and TransPoint. Because those billing consolidators are distribution channels to consumers, most large companies want to send bills through both systems, but that means supporting two different sets of technologies.
"The biller has to go through headaches," says Ravi Ganesan,
CheckFree's chief technology officer. "The only way to get to a
TransPoint front end is using TransPoint technology. The same for
CheckFree. Interoperability will happen. You need the aggregators and
billers kicking us, saying 'make it happen.'"
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By: Gregory Dalton, with additional reprting by Bruce Caldwell
Copyright 1999 CMP Media Inc.
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