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Technology Stocks : CheckFree (CKFR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brooks Jackson who wrote (674)	10/23/1997 11:24:00 PM
From: Josh Sliver	Respond to of 8545

A few more points made on the conference call... Kight stated that the fee structure of MSFDC's bill presentment was strange, that MSFDC currently has it set up that the merchant pays all the fee, instead of CheckFree's 50/50 split between the merchant and the bank. Kight's assertion was that no biller wants to front the total fee, and thus a competitive advantage for CheckFree. Kight also said that no biller that CheckFree has talked with has signed up with only MSFDC, the billers are going with both MSFDC and CheckFree or none at all. The reasons for a biller not signing up for e-bill, according to Kight, have been that the volume and economies of scale are not yet there for the biller to bite the bullet. Kight added that the billers always say "call us next year." It was Kight's opinion that the e-bill playing field contained only about 500 major billers representing 50% of the bills paid. During Q1, CheckFree started a full-time sales staff of 15 to sell the payment and billing services to merchants, so the sales effort should be going strong. There was also a brief mention of a Wells Fargo study that calculated the profitability of their online banking customers. It sounds like the report will be published shortly, but the gist was that the online banking and billpay customers were more profitable and longer-term customers than the standard accounts. Kight stated that Wells was surprised to learn how much better their online banking customers were and had in fact underestimated their profitability.