>>>CheckFree will point to the billers web site, where the biller is free to write all the html that they want. BellSouth is not a good example because they were the first cut at bill presentment.
Well, you're right and your wrong. I think. Here's why:
BellSouth was one of the first cuts on bill presentment. When we started implementing them, they were passing us an extract from their existing billing file over a VAN (value-added network). We had to write code to automatically convert the extract into a flat file, that could then populate a database of e-bill recipients.
Their billing data, including call summaries, would populate a HTML template that typically I would build with someone from the UNIX team. The completed e-bill is fed to the e-bill server behind the corporate firewall, where recipients could log in and view.
The point is that, in order to make this doable for prospective billers, we had to be ready to accept any kind of billing data in any format, and custom build a process for each biller, if need be. If that meant doing it all ourselves, well, fine. If it means framing a HTML document pulled from the biller's server, that's OK too.
>>>One drawback he specifically mentioned about CKFR bill present was that it could not handle the dozens of pages of itemized calls that a
business requires.
Yeah, the product was built for household consumers, not business consumers. One must specify a maximum number of records when creating these applications. We had a household consumer in mind when we built this beast, and that's clearly not sufficient for businesses. |
