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

To: Tom Klempay who wrote (6848)	6/23/1999 9:33:00 PM
From: salva	Respond to of 20297

Interesting news analysis on CKFR. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Could CheckFree get checked off? By Tim Clark Staff, CNET News.com June 23, 1999, 5:50 p.m. PT news analysis CheckFree, which offers financial institutions an outsourcing service for online transactions, saw its stock lose nearly a quarter of its value today after three major bank customers announced their own joint venture for online billing and payment. The swift swoon, coming only a day after CheckFree sold $50 million in new shares to investors, has some analysts questioning CheckFree's model. As online banking becomes more critical to major banks, they may bring it in-house. CheckFree's management was caught by surprise at the news that Wells Fargo, Chase Manhattan, and First Union would form a new company to let major utilities, credit card firms, and other big billers to present bills online rather than through the mail. (See related story) "Banking is bringing [online bill] presentment and payment services in-house," E*Offering bank analyst Gary Craft, who was already bearish on CheckFree, told investors today. "As seen in many processing markets, when business economics, transaction volume [or both] get big enough, there is every incentive to bring these services in-house." Not all analysts are so pessimistic. "It's clearly a negative for CheckFree, but not something that should have taken 10 points out of the stock," said Steve Olson of Pacific Growth Equities, who has had a "buy" recommendation, his second highest, on CheckFree since February. Quote Snapshot June 23, 1999, 1:01 p.m. PT Checkfree Holdings Corp. CKFR 28.7500 -8.9375 -23.71% by symbol by name More from CNET Investor Quotes delayed 20+ minutes CheckFree's stock fell 8.9375 today, closing at 28.75 after trading as low as 27.25. But even CheckFree chief executive Pete Kight admitted the new venture, dubbed the Exchange, competes with his company's online bill delivery service. "They did not give any advance notice of the announcement, and it will compete," Kight said on a hastily called teleconference today. "We expect to continue to compete quite successfully." He added: "We have known that commercial banks wanted into this space. Today we learned that three of them got organized." So far, the online bill-delivery market is long on promise and short on actual business--Kight said CheckFree has booked only $10,000 in online bill-presentment revenue in the last nine months. Total revenues were $145.4 million for that period. But CheckFree's bread-and-butter business, letting consumers pay their bills online either directly through CheckFree or through their banks with CheckFree outsourcing the service, could be at risk once the Exchange banks' bill-delivery system is set up. Industry analyst Avivah Litan of Gartner Group thinks the Exchange banks will add bill-payment capabilities of their own once gets bill delivery running. In the meantime, she suggests, those banks still need CheckFree for a online payments. Easier said than done, CheckFree responds. "Providing all the bill payment capability is not easy, so they would have their work cut out for them," CheckFree spokeswoman Laurinda Wilson said. "It's much more complicated than credit card processing." She points to CheckFree's ongoing work with another bank consortium, Integrion, which began as an IBM-led effort to work with 18 huge North American banks to create a complete suite of online financial services the banks could offer. Today CheckFree is Integrion's chief vendor for online bill-paying, a role the company would surely aspire to continue with the Exchange. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

To: Tom Klempay who wrote (6848)	6/23/1999 10:07:00 PM
From: TLindt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20297

Merrill, E-Trade, NetBank, CheckFree and a ton of others have the banks doing an about-face on this net stuff. Well you very well could be right, somebody brought me in a Chicago Tribune Article on NetB@nk where an AP writer, Noelle Knox, relates her personal experience with Net Banking through NetB@nk(Monday June 21st edition, section 4, page 10)...have to admit some of it I read I've expericnced myself...but I learned to live with it as part of the growth curve. She ended her article by closing Her checking account with with NetBank on June 15th...but before doing so she called and talked to D.R. Grimes...their quotes relating to account growth. June 14: I talk to Net.Bank's vice chairman and chief executive officer D.R. Grimes and give him the run down. He explains: "We increased our account growth by a factor of five, and we found a lot of areas that put strain on, and we've had to go in and make changes." He said the bank is opening 350 to 400 accounts per day, "so what we've found out is the vendors we were working with were not set up either for that kind of volume coming from one place" Service is important but growth is too...being both a customer and an investor..sometimes I've been happy and sometimes pissed off with on line. What rang out was this to me...account growth by a factor of five and is opening 350 to 400 accounts per day Back in December if I recall the account growth was 350 to 400 a week at NetB@nk, 5 days a week?...factor of five? Some of my own math 400 accounts a day by 250 work days in a year...100,000 new accounts? Slanted and optomistic on my part, but I can remember when this bank had 5,000 customers and grew 2000 accounts in quarter. Now they seem to do that 2000 in a matter of days if I can believe what I read. I remember the same negative account service comments on the e-broker threads as they piled it on exponentially. If that truely is the case and we will all hear about it next month in a press release these Brick Banks are getting creamed exponentially in e....and deserve it.