CheckFree Migrates Credit Card Balance Transfer Clients to New RPP System
ATLANTA (June 10, 1998) -- CheckFree (NASDAQ: CKFR) announced
today that it has completed the migration of more than one-half of its
account balance transfer (BT) credit card clients to CheckFree's new
Remittance Processing Pipeline (RPP).
With the addition of the latest BT volume to RPP, 30 percent of all
CheckFree transactions have been migrated to the next generation
processing platform, which currently processes bill payment transactions
for Chase Manhattan Bank, NationsBank and Key Bank. RPP, a product of
CheckFree's Genesis consolidation project, is a stand-alone, easily
accessible and flexible system designed to aggregate remittances from a
variety of bill payment and remittance processing systems. It provides a
single source for payment consolidation, payment editing and payment
routing.
"We are excited to move our credit card balance transfer clients to the new
processing engine," said Peter J. Kight, chairman and chief executive officer
of CheckFree. "With the flexibility and accessibility of RPP up and running,
we will be able to accelerate our service quality initiatives and increase our
electronic remittance transactions."
By moving the latest BT transactions to the new processing system,
CheckFree will no longer store balance transfer subscriber data for certain
BT clients, and instead move to a pure remittance environment. This move
to the significantly more efficient RPP processing engine will permanently
move approximately 150,000 consumer accounts from CheckFree's bill
payment subscriber base to the balance transfer account base. "While all of
our BT clients are now on a pure transaction-based revenue model, this has
no effect on our BT revenue or operating results," said Kight. "In fact, as
we move additional transactions through the new remittance pipeline, we
will continue to take advantage of significant economies of scale."
CheckFree currently processes from 600,000 to 1 million credit card balance
transfers per month. Balance Transfer clients are able to take advantage of
quicker settlement with nearly 75 percent electronic remittance through
CheckFree's RPP, and more economically and efficiently retain or acquire
new customers through balance consolidation offers.
CheckFree completed development of the RPP engine in 1997 as part of the
company's three-phase Genesis Platform Consolidation project. In
production ahead of schedule, the remittance engine is currently processing
high volumes of transactions from a number of large financial institutions.
The second phase of the project -- merging the company's Chicago, Austin
and Columbus data centers to create a single, centralized, state-of-the-art
data center -- will be completed by June 30, 1998. Also ahead of schedule,
CheckFree has completed the phase three development of a new online
system for banking and bill payment and will soon begin beta testing.
About CheckFree Founded in 1981, CheckFree Corporation
(www.checkfree.com) is the leading provider of financial electronic
commerce services, software and related products for more than 2.25 million
consumers, 1,000 businesses and 850 financial institutions. CheckFree
designs, develops and markets services that enable its customers to make
electronic payments and collections, automate paper-based recurring
financial transactions and conduct secure transactions on the Internet. |
