Benny, re:"kind of like saying after they invented the TelePhone..."
Hi Benny,
Exactly. The telephone did not matter until they upgraded the telegraph system to support it. I mean, it is a great invention, but if the infrastructure is not there to support it, then it is of little practical use.
Same for e-bill. I don't use MCI or First Union or AT&T. I am not going to use them because they use e-bills. For practical purposes, it is not available yet... right?
Using PayMyBills as an example, when e-bill becomes widely available, their customers will have the option of receiving their bill on-line, probably with their bank. PayMyBills has already trained their customer base for the exact same service that the bank would offer, so the customer would have to be pretty motivated to switch... because what difference would it be to the customer. None. No? The motivation for the customer would have to be the cost. So, could the banks could do it for less then PayMyBills or would the banks have to do it at a loss?
CheckFree would definitely be a beneficiary if the banks move to e-bill as the CheckFree customer base is across all those banks. However, the bank has a much smaller customer base... potentially much, much smaller than PayMyBills. Many businesses have been born that have specialized in what was considered traditional banking activity- mortgages, car loans, check cashing, certificate-of-deposits. Why could it not work for bill presentment/payment?
When e-billing becomes available, I would not be surprised to see PayMyBills hook up with CheckFree, and then PayMyBills would realize and even greater cost savings as they would serve as a third party e-bill payment service with an established, active customer base and they would no longer have to manually present the bills... they would simply be the processing center.
Also, you wrote, "MCI WorldCom realizes at least $1.00 in savings for every invoice that gets paid online". But we are talking about bill "presentment", not bill "payment", and our entire discussion has revolved around "presentment", which is the PayMyBills angle.
Just my opinion.
Jon :) |
