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Technology Stocks : CheckFree Holdings Corp. (CKFR), the next Dell, Intel? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TLindt who wrote (6811)	6/23/1999 4:26:00 PM
From: Rob C.	Respond to of 20297

NEW YORK, June 23 (Reuters) - Payments company CheckFree Holdings Corp. <CKFR.O>, to combat a sharp slide in its stock price, said Wednesday the market was "grossly overreacting" to plans by three big U.S. banks to set up a competing electronic billing system. Its stock dropped 25 percent to $28.31 after leading banks Chase Manhattan Corp. <CMB.N>, First Union Corp. <FTU.N> and Wells Fargo and Co. <WFC.N> announced they would from a company so people and businesses could get and sell bills online. The system the banks intend to develop, to be called The Exchange until the naming process was over, would compete with an electronic billing service CheckFree runs that lets companies receive payments from customers over the Internet, but CheckFree said it was not worried. "We are prepared to compete vigorously with anyone that wishes to sign up billers and given our superior experience and technological resources, we expect to continue to compete quite successfully," CheckFree Chairman Pete Kight said. The ability to pay bills over the Internet is considered vital to the success of online banking, as a growing number of people make purchases electronically. CheckFree, which now provides the three banks with electronic billing and payment services as well as support for some of their Web banking platforms, said it spoke with the banks and would continue to provide such services. "There are significant opportunities for us to work with these banks as clients and to compete with them on the biller side," Kight told a telephone conference call on Wednesday. Kight said CheckFree already had been competing with banks for corporate clients who would route their bills to customers through CheckFree's system. "We understand that on the commercial side of the Exchange banks view us as competitors and they clearly did not want to give us any advance notice of their plans or their announcement," Kight said. CheckFree drew less than 20 percentof its total revenues from Chase, Wells Fargo and First Union, it said. It now had contracts with over 50 of the top U.S. billers, which accounted for more than half a billion bills per month, and said it aimed to have more than half of these 150 billers as clients by the end of fiscal 2000. REUTERS Rtr 16:10 06-23-99 Copyright 1999, Reuters News Service Copyright © 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. or such other notice as may be agreed by the parties in writing.