Maybe they should name this IPO, EPAY2....
Princeton Telecom To Go Public Soon
March 16, 1999
CFO Alert : Princeton Telecom, the electronic lockbox firm that works to concentrate bill payment and remittance information and aspires to be a bill publisher between the billers and aggregators such as Checkfree, will soon announce plans to take its company public.
The 15-year-old company, based in Princeton, N.J., has not yet announced its IPO, but will do so soon, according to Dick Corl, executive vice president. Princeton Telecom is currently one of the best-connected firms in the business, with connections to 700 merchants.
Corl explained the company's place in the big picture is between billers and a company like Checkfree, which currently has 80% of the bill payment market, and gives banks the bills to pay. Princeton Telecom would publish bills on behalf of billers, send the content to aggregators like Checkfree, which would aggregate the bills on behalf of the banks.
Corl sees a future world where consumers will have several options to pay all their bills, one of which would be a bank's own Web site, because it would have links to all the major billers through bill publishers like Princeton Telecom and aggregators like Checkfree. Some other options for the consumers to pay their bills would Internet portals like Yahoo! or Infoseek in addition to the biller's own Web site.
"For the bank, they're going to want content and the only way they're going to attract the consumer to Chase.com (for example) to pay the bills is to have a lot of bills. The banks are interested in having as many billers publishing as many bills as quickly as possible until there are a lot of presentments. Otherwise it's probably not very compelling to the consumer, " Corl said.
Corl added that the major portals would also find bill-paying abilities attractive content.
[Copyright 1999, American Banker]
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