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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: westpacific who wrote (40119)	12/7/1999 3:01:00 PM
From: Raj Ramaswamy	Respond to of 108040

OPAY -- Thanks for the heads up.. Official Payments' options lets consumers use their credit cards to pay, by telephone or through the Internet, income taxes, sales and use taxes, property taxes and fines for traffic violations and parking citations. .Its government clients include the IRS, the States of California, Illinois and New Jersey, the District of Columbia and about 425 municipalities. ''There is no real organized competition out there. It's the advantage of being this company and being a first-mover. There are some small local companies in some areas but no organized company (on a national scale),'' said Chief Executive Officer Thomas Evans, former CEO of GeoCities Inc., in a phone interview. ''The plan of strategy is to embed our service in as many (cities) as possible and attempt to lock up the market. We are attempting to focus on becoming the de facto standard of payment business,'' Evans said. The company derives its revenues primarily from charging consumers a convenience fee, which is either a fixed amount or a percentage of the payment made, for using its credit card payment services. It posted a $1.5 million net loss on revenues of $7.2 million for the nine months ended September 30. Evans said one of the good things about the company's business was that Official Payments' government clients take care of the marketing for the company. Marketing is often a big portion of new Internet companies' budgets.