Banc One Pulls Ahead In E-Bill Race
October 13, 1998
CFO Alert : Banc One Corp. plans to roll out an on-line program that will allow its customers to view and to pay bills completely electronically as early as January, the bank announced last week at a conference.
A bank representative made the announcement at the On-line Banking Association's Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment Conference in San Francisco. If Banc One remains on schedule, it will be the first institution to offer its customers fully electronic, Web-based bill presentment and payment services. But it will not be alone for long, as at least half a dozen other institutions are currently involved in pilot programs.
Today, many banks allow customers to pay bills over the Internet. But no bank has offered customers a system that presents actual bills on screen.
Banc One will be launching the service along with Philadelphia- based Integrion Financial Network and Columbus, Ohio-based CheckFree Corp. Checkfree is currently working on individual pilot programs with Wells Fargo, KeyBank, Norwest, and Mellon. But at least one electronic banking source agreed that Banc One is likely to complete its product first.
"Many banks are at different stages of the testing phase," he said. "My sense is that Banc One is further along than most."
The new integrated service will enable Banc One customers to receive, view and scrutinize a wide range of bills electronically. Customers can pay these bills through their computer, transferring funds from their bank accounts to pay any biller that presents an on-line bill through CheckFree. The system will connect Integrion's Interactive Financial Serivices (IFS) platform, CheckFree's Bill Presentment and
Remittance system and Banc One's internal bill payment technology.
"Banc One's launch of the Integrion/CheckFree solution clearly marks a new era of sophisticated on-line financial services being offered to consumers through the industry's trusted agent--their bank," said Peter Knight, chairman of CheckFree. "Institutions like Banc One--which offer consumers all critical financial transactions in a
seamless Web environment and provide an important distribution channel for billers--are clearly the driving force behind the rapid expansion of on-line financial management."
A spokesperson for Wells Fargo, which started a six-month pilot program in July, said the testing phase has "been very successful" so far. In 1995, Wells became the first bank to offer customers banking over the Internet.
Electronic bill payment promises to reduce paper and transaction costs for banks while expanding the services a bank can provide to its customers. " Receiving bills on-line instead of waiting for snail mail to arrive is the ultimate in convenience," said Dudley Nigg, executive vice president of On-line Financial Services at Wells.
Although Citibank has yet to set a completion date for its bill presentment technology, it recently announced a pilot program with Redmond, Washington-based Transpoint that aims to couple several advanced features already in use by the two companies.
As part of the agreement, Transpoint, which was originally launched by Microsoft and First Data Corp., will take advantage of the bank's "pay anyone" technology. This enables consumers to pay any bill or make any payment regardless of whether the participating biller delivers the bill electronically.
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