ECredit Speeds Up E-Business
By Edward Cone, Inter@ctive Week
Post Date: July 26, 1999 9:57 AM ET
Updated: July 28, 1999 2:35 PM ET
ECredit.com of Westwood, Mass., has released a Web-based credit application and approval package that should help clear one of the major choke points in the e-commerce stream. The eCredit product automates the credit checks that vendors and financial firms run on customers for big-ticket items, reducing the time needed for credit approval to minutes from hours or even days.
Credit is the lifeblood of large-scale commerce, especially for business-to-business transactions; but until now the rapid pace of e-commerce has slowed to a crawl in matters involving credit requests.
"This fundamentally changes the nature of buying online," said Carol Baroudi, senior electronic business strategist at the Hurwitz Group.
"I think this is one of the most significant rollouts we've seen in a while. It will become very important in assessing credit risks and extending credit lines as the size of Web transactions scales up."
One early adopter is Fleet Leasing in Troy, Mich., where Application Development Manager Craig Butterworth likes the way eCredit allows the office equipment dealers and vendors the company serves to check a customer's credit status in real-time. Meanwhile, the company's credit analysts can also update files online.
"This is really beneficial stuff," Butterworth said. "It's exciting."
ECredit.com founder Venkat Srinivasan, a former professor at Northeastern University who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on applying technology to the credit process, established the company as SSR Solutions in 1993. Having developed server-based applications for credit checks, the private, venture capital-backed firm found the move to the Web relatively easy.
Srinivasan said real-time credit will be particularly important to the development of commercial exchange sites, adding that the company is now working with three portal-style marketplaces to develop credit-process solutions. "Speed is paramount in making sure a customer gets the financing they need, but so is your own risk management," Srinivasan said.
Eagerly awaiting the eCredit product, which is customizable to reflect the parameters of a given lender, is Yvonne Hawley, a credit manager at Cargill, the enormous commodities company based in Wayzata, Minn.
"This will allow us to eliminate the double-keying we do to move e-mail applications onto the system," said Hawley, who currently uses eCredit.com's non-Web products.
"That's a way of reducing the time spent on an application while increasing the accuracy," she said.
Analyst Baroudi, co-author of the book The Internet for Dummies, thinks Web-based credit decisions could spell trouble for traditional lenders who take weeks to process mortgage and loan requests.
"This is not a win for the paper-pushers," she said. |
