Mark:
Remember, CKFR (and the Genesis project in particular) are focused on building a robust pipeline for handling the final, BACK-END portion of millions (and eventually billions) of payments. To help germinate the E-pay market over the last 15 years, they've handled both the front and back ends, with all the expense of servicing a couple million retail customers. They're now beginning to hand off the front end to certain bank customers. I'm sure there has been an active debate within CKFR about if and when to pull the plug on retail, and what critical mass is for the wholesale business.
In the meantime, they are starting all over again on the bill presentment side with a new (but fortunately much smaller) batch of "retail" billing customers. Hopefully some of the support system built up over the years to serve bill payment can be migrated to their corporate billing customers.
BTW, Crestar estimated they would save about $200K per QUARTER, not per month, by taking over the front end from CKFR. On 50K customers, that's a $1.33 per month haircut to CKFR, not $4.00.
Charlie |
