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Technology Stocks : CheckFree Holdings Corp. (CKFR), the next Dell, Intel?
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To: Dwight E. Karlsen who wrote (9279)8/22/1999 1:21:00 PM
From: BitWizrd  Read Replies (1) of 20297
 
>>>Additionally, business-to-business bill payment has other wrinkles, which electronic payment only does not address.

<<<

I would qualify this statement a bit further, and say that small business to small business bill payment has these problems.

To be completely accurate, there have been existing electronic solutions for passing information (like invoice numbers) along with remittance, but they are accesible only to large companies.

This kind of electronic messaging relies on electronic messaging standards that are slow to develop (they are voted on by ANSI committee) and even slower to implement. The time and expense of implentation have kept this kind of messaging from the shallow pockets of small business.

Typically, the messaging is done over proprietary networks, or VANs, which are expensive to access and to use. But there is a movement afoot, greatly enhanced by the growing availability and effectiveness of virtual private networks (or VPNs) to do this kind of messaging over public networks, like the Internet.

So, two things - in my opinion - must happen before small business bill presentation and payment becomes as viable as consumer EBPP: a strong and standardized encryption protocol must be made available to private concerns, unhobbled by regressive security laws that would give government a "back door" to any and every encrypted message; and the ANSI X12 standards committees must provide standard file formats for financial electronic messaging quickly.

It is not clear to me how CheckFree can make themselves a part of this process. It seems to me that any company wanting to participate must wait until these two steps are finished before they can deliver value with B to B electronic services. Of this I am sure: it is too late in this process for a company like CheckFree to roll out what it hopes will become a de facto standard - as they did with OFX - and circumvent the necessity of the items I mentioned above. There is already too much time and money invested in them by government and large industry.

The best CheckFree can do is to continue to execute and remain number one in consumer services, so that when B to B services can finally happen, CheckFree can leverage their existing relationships with institutions and parlay their stature into a significant role in B to B services.

It is going to take a long while.

Bit.
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