Well here is why we are where we are IMO.
First read this from A.W. on the Checkfree News only Thread.
PC Magazine: You may soon be able to pay all your bills at a single Web site
By Sharon Nash
The American consumer is flooded with bills almost every day: bills for utilities, bills for credit cards, bills for medical expenses. The paper trail of bills, checks, and receipts is confusing at best, but the Internet is offering a solution: electronic bill presentment and payment.
Bill consolidator CheckFree has several years' head start over Microsoft-backed TransPoint and is the current favorite. Meanwhile, the Sun Microsystems/Netscape Alliance also has big plans for online bill payment. Most people, however, still prefer to pay by paper check and snail mail.
Traditionally, billers such as utilities and credit card companies send paper bills. Customers then mail checks to billers, and billers deal with banks to debit accounts. For several years, online bill payment has been available through Microsoft Money's and Quicken's online options, as well as through an increasing number of banks such as Chase and Citibank. This process saves you the trouble of writing and mailing checks, but paper checks are still produced and mailed to billers.
More recently, consolidators such as CheckFree and TransPoint have gone a step farther, providing bill aggregation and Web presentation technology to billers. Customers visit billers' (or consolidators') Web sites directly, enter bank information, and arrange for electronic checks or direct debits. "Bill payment has been available for several years, but bill presentment is the final piece of the puzzle," says Gustavo Machado, a spokesperson for CheckFree. "Presentment will make this a paperless process." Currently, only two banks--Bank One and First Union--present bills to customers using CheckFree as the processor, says Machado.
With a rumored partnership between CheckFree and Yahoo! in the works, an even simpler approach may be available in which consumers will be able to visit a single portal or bank site and review a summary of all of their bills, which a consolidator has provided. Consumers can then visit billers' Web sites via a frame in the portal. The benefits? Consumers need to visit only one site, portals and billers get eyeballs and customer loyalty, and consolidators get a piece of every transaction.
"For the moment, a direct distribution model suits everybody. It provides sticky content that will bring customers back time and again," says Avivah Litan, a director for market research firm GartnerGroup. Nevertheless, she predicts some dramatic changes. "Portals will eventually get in on the action, get rid of consolidators like CheckFree and TransPoint, and go directly to the billers themselves," she says. She goes even further to suggest that within five years consumers will have electronic agents sent out from household devices that will handle such chores as bill payment automatically, eliminating the need for Web portals as we understand them today.
When it comes to purchasing goods online, electronic payment methods are multiplying at breakneck speed. Dozens of electronic wallets are available, as are keyboard-based credit card readers and even cellular phones with credit card swipes. Some analysts say consumers aren't quite ready to embrace alternative methods of bill payment, such as electronic cash or smart cards. "In the next five years, a lot of households will be banking online and receiving and paying bills online. There will be lots of different ways to pay, but credit cards will be dominant for online shopping," says Rob Sterling, an analyst at Jupiter Communications. "We still don't have a truly fluid way to move money on the Web," he says.
Start-up UTM Systems has come up with a solution: the UTM Machine, a standard floppy disk reengineered as a magnetic-stripe reader with a slot for a credit card. To make a Web purchase, you slide your credit, debit, or ATM card into the disk and insert it in your PC's floppy disk drive. An ATM-like interface pops up on-screen, and you enter your PIN via your keyboard. Since the system is linked to the ATM network, it's able to verify your PIN just as an ATM does.
The UTM Machine eliminates the need to reenter payment information whenever you make purchases. And the rather low-tech approach doesn't require you to get a special smart card. The mag stripe readers will be available for free from banks.
<<PC Magazine -- 07-01-99>>
[Copyright 1999, Ziff Wire]
Message 10391637
Now read this from the United Kingdom where Transpoint just got the floor in the news...from a Yahoo Thread Poster.
Portal strategy - article part 1
by: haworthc 7213 of 7218
I'm new to this board, although I've been long CKFR for several months. I hadn't seen any comments on the following
discussion from TransPoint's CEO - specifically see his comments Checkfree's portal strategy at end of article.
Firm moves to ally with banks.
Electronic Payments International - June 30,1999
Bill presentment and payments has been dubbed 'the next big thing' in the US. EPI speaks with TransPoint chief executive Lewis Levin TRANSPOINT'S NEWLY appointed chief executive Lewis Levin - an ex-Microsoft executive with the web credentials requisite for such a position - is obsessed with 'doing it right the first time'. In a wide-ranging interview with EPI , Levin ruminated on the future of bill presentment and payment and the role he will play in a market that initially became a two-horse race between TransPoint and CheckFree. Indeed, Levin seems to relish the competition. "The biggest difference between TransPoint and CheckFree is that we focused on robust scaleable technology from day one and built our system from the ground up. We are not blindly focused on transactions as a revenue source and so we give billers tremendous freedom from day one," he said. TransPoint and CheckFree are racing to create partnerships with the biggest billers, such as electric utilities, credit cards companies and finance companies. CheckFree's initial lead comes from its early launch but TransPoint is gaining ground fast in one of Microsoft's critical e-commerce ventures. Levin, who took charge of Microsoft's desktop finance division in 1996, with responsibility for Microsoft Money, the MSN Investor website that later became the MoneyCentral online service and the MSN Personal Finance Channel, played a significant role in the development of TransPoint. "He is a critical appointment for TransPoint," said Scott Smith, president of the Tera Group, a technology consulting firm in McLean, Virginia. "He has the background to help them close the gap with CheckFree and he knows the culture." TransPoint, which was started by Microsoft and First Data in 1997, originally scheduled its system to go live in early 1998. While CheckFree's system went live, TransPoint continued to hone its product for months before going live in May. Levin, who formerly headed Microsoft's desktop finance division, said the
wait was worth it. "It was crucial for us to demonstrate that we can achieve scale right out of the box," Levin said. "We could have got to market sooner with hand-holding and custom work for each biller but that would not have been the real thing. This is an industrial, automated process from day one to handle reasonable volumes at the start." The cautious build-up resulted in some bad press for TransPoint: Wells Fargo, Bank One, First Union and Merrill Lynch decided to suspend their pilot testing pending system upgrades. Levin remains sanguine about the pilots, given the infancy of the market. "We are at the early ramp-up stage in bill presentment and payment," he said. "We have to build volume to get ready for consumers. It's hot for the industry but not yet for consumers, so getting to scaling up - having enough major billers so consumers see value - is key. This period is indeterminate in length but should start five to six months from now, then last six months to two years. This could all take place within a three-year period," he added. Levin's
message - that "getting it right" is better than "getting there first"- is hitting home. In the past few weeks, TransPoint has announced deals with Banc One, 'the big six' Canadian banks and seven regional US banks.
TransPoint is now working with more than 50 major billing companies, of which three have gone live: Consolidated Edison of New York, the Orange County Register in California and PECO Energy. Several others are nearing completion of testing, including GTE, BellSouth and JC Penney, and several credit cards billers are on tap in the near future. Other pilot banks include KeyCorp, Mellon Bank, PNC Bank, Wachovia Corp - which announced its participation last month - and Citigroup, a
minority partner in TransPoint whose major shareholders are First Data and Microsoft. PNC is using TransPoint in its pilot with Xerox, a major corporate client. The bank presents bills
to Xerox trading partners using TransPoint but will also begin testing CheckFree's electronic bill service this summer. "It was important for us to go live," Levin said. "Now our goal is to minimise change, which will accelerate billers and banks to live status. We expect billers to go live each week." Levin envisions a rapid ramp-up period in what he predicts as a $12 billion market. The financial services market is not accustomed to the
introduction cycle of the Internet providers, he said, comparing the exponential growth of e-mail and online trading to traditional banking products like checking and ATMs. "In
financial services, no one is prepared for the growth to come," he said. "The difference is that the consumer comes trained and eager to use the service and is highly receptive. There is this incredibly fertile ground of people receptive and for whom adoption could be rapid." Levin is also encouraged by another major difference between e-bill presentment and payment and other banking technologies: the support of the merchant community.
"Compare our product to home banking," he said. "We've had home banking for years now and it never lit anybody's fires, never mind the cost to the consumer and the frustration of
the technology. Can you think of an instance when a biller encouraged a customer to use home bill payment?" Billers will encourage e-bill presentment and payment and consumers will receive consistent messages to move to e-bills. "This is a technology that is cheaper right out of the box and cheaper every time you use it," he said. "There's no big wait for the pay-off and both sides of the equation will love that." Levin dismissed the move toward portal site agreements by CheckFree and other e-commerce players, declaring that TransPoint will align itself closely to the banking industry. "Portals can't give financial information. The gist of the issue is: isn't a portal a threat to banks?" Unlike portals, which Levin described as "a destination to get things done like e-mail, news and searching",
consumers look to 'destination sites' to suit specific purposes. "That's why portal viewership is stable. They have a lead but haven't increased it," Levin said. "Banks give financial information and are the place to do financial management. If the relevance to the consumer is financial information, banks will win."?
Copyright (c) Lafferty Publications Ltd 1999 All rights reserved The IDA Tower, Pearse
Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. Tel: +353(0)1 671 8022 Fax: +353(0)1 671 5321
lafferty.co.uk editors@lafferty.ie
COPYRIGHT 1999
You got to chew on both pieces for a minute or two...this seems to be the hangup here...banks own it and want to keep it, and I can't blame them...but the fact is, it is not theres to lose...but rather it's my choice to make. After all I chose them now, because up until now..on paper anyway/by paper...they were my only choice.
The Internet does one thing...change things fricken fast. I question whether what the Transpoint guy says about banks provide financial information...what about e-loan EELN, Yahoo! Finance or Quicken.Com..and innovative things like that. Yea granted in the physical world Banks provide financial information...because I don't get an Altanta News Paper and have only been there 4 or 5 times in my life...how in the hell else would I have ever know that there was a Bank down there paying such high interest? The InterNet I say. Like my current/prior Bank whould have said, "close your account with us, stop paying $15 a month service charge reguardless of balance..join up with NetB@ank, get free checks, free Bill Pay, and no service charges" SHIT, I don't live in Indiana....
The InterNet I say is then my 21st Century source of Financial Information? It is...yes it is!?...there is a lot more out there in InterNet land then on any one Banks WebSite. |
