We can't get them all....
Have to now watch the news on Edify/Corrillian/Integrion to see who is going to use who's bill pay. Probably won't see Checkfree mentioned as platform when any of those three other systems are installed by a Bank....in the meantime the Bankers all have lumps in the bottom of their shorts today after this....
WSJ: Uneasy Banks Must Make a Deposit on On-Line Future
By David Bank
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
If Microsoft Corp. has its way, banks could soon be giving away WebTVs to attract new customers. And automated teller machines will be running the company's Internet Explorer Web browser.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is expected to demonstrate both devices today to nearly 8,000 bankers at a trade show in New Orleans. And he's not the only technology titan promising to help banks find savings by serving more customers online, where transactions can be handled at a fraction of the cost of live tellers, telephone calls or even ATMs.
But the promise conceals a threat: If banks don't use the new technology to secure their relationships with their customers, others, including Microsoft and Intuit Inc., the leading seller of personal-finance software, are ready to take advantage of the banks' missed opportunity.
Indeed, the software companies "have an edge right now," concedes Bill Randle, executive vice president of Huntington Bancshares Inc., a Columbus, Ohio, bankholding company. "This is an information business. It's not about money. Money is digital information in today's society."
That makes banking and related financial services one of the hottest areas in the emerging electronic marketplace. Home banking, which has been offered in various forms for more than a decade, has been slow to take off, but that was before the Internet's popularity exploded and offered the banks a low-cost channel to their customers. "We're seeing double year-over-year growth," said Michael DeVico, executive vice president of interactive banking at BankAmerica Corp.
The opportunity is to provide customers with one-stop shopping for all of their financial needs, from managing their checking accounts to paying their bills to making investment decisions to shopping for car loans, mortgages and insurance policies. But such a menu of services goes beyond the portfolio of many traditional banks, confronting them with the challenge of holding onto their customers when competitors are only a click away.
In response, most banks have adopted a "fortress mentality," said John Hagel III, a consultant in McKinsey & Co.'s Silicon Valley office. "The mindset is totally defensive."
Instead of simply moving their existing, vertically integrated operations online, Mr. Hagel says the Internet will force banks to unbundle their traditional operations and decide whether they will be in the business of processing transactions, offering specific financial products or services, or helping customers manage their entire range of financial decisions, even if that means offering services from traditional competitors.
Not surprisingly, many bankers insist maintaining customer relationships is their highest priority. Many of the banks' back-office transaction-processing operations, such as credit-card processing, are already contracted out to third parties. New providers, such as Integrion Financial Network, a consortium of major banks, and International Business Machines Corp., are seeking to provide a backbone network for electronic-banking services.
Tuesday, Hewlett-Packard Co., its Verifone unit and Electronic Data Systems Corp. said they had attracted major financial institutions, including Citicorp's Citibank and Wells Fargo & Co., to another consortium to be called First Global Commerce, which will offer banks the ability to track and analyze transactions and offer customers other investment opportunities based on that data.
"Once you understand the transactions your customers do, you'll be able to serve them," says Debra Miele, H-P's marketing manager for the new venture.
"Dow Jones News Service"
"Copyright(c) 1997, Dow Jones & Company, Inc."
Uneasy Banks -2-: Software Giants May Leap Into Mix
Banks are also seeking to stem the erosion of their privileged role in providing specific financial services to their customers. Home buyers, through traditional brokers or on the Web, shop for mortgages across many lenders. Similarly, most customers choose their credit card on the basis of low interest rates or other features rather than loyalty to their local bank.
The new front line in that battle is in the presentation and payment of household bills, and that's where Microsoft has stirred the greatest fear among bankers. MSFDC, Microsoft's joint venture with First Data Corp., is offering utilities, telephone companies and other billers an alternative to printing and mailing millions of bills each month. Customers would receive and pay their bills through MSFDC's on-line service.
The joint venture is also offering banks the opportunity to provide the bill-paying service to their customers under their own brand name, and gain a share of the fees. But MSFDC will also have its own service for consumers to receive and pay their bills, without the banks' involvement.
Lewis Levin, vice president of Microsoft's desktop finance division, said the company is actively combating the notion that it wants to become a financial institution itself. Instead, Microsoft's goal is to provide banks the technology they need to offer integrated services to customers, he said.
Still, banks are wary that Microsoft could use the bill presentation and payment service, which will likely be a standard feature in the company's Web browser, as a way to encroach on the banks' relationships with their customers by offering other services.
Michael Gazala, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., thinks Microsoft's threat to banks is overstated. He says Microsoft may be seeking to develop a "matchmaking hub" to bring consumers together with providers of all kinds of financial services, "but there's no reason banks couldn't provide the same service."
Indeed, Microsoft is offering banks the technology to do just that. In his keynote address, Mr. Gates is expected to say that Microsoft is leading an effort to encourage banks and software developers to agree on a standard way of representing common functions such as customer profiles, loan information and mortgage rates, so the chunks of code, or "objects," can be reused in Web pages, ATMs, tellers' workstations and mainframe computers.
These standards, which could speed the development of such software, are based on Microsoft's Common Object Model, or COM, and would, of course, drive demand for its Windows operating systems.
Mr. Gates, in his address, is expected to demonstrate such software running on the company's WebTV devices, which display Web sites on standard television sets. He also should demonstrate an ATM using a version of the Microsoft's Web browser. The kiosk, which attaches to a Windows NT server, allows banks to call up personal profiles of its customers and target their marketing efforts. Tuesday, Diebold Inc. and Wells Fargo showed off such an ATM, which can dispense cash and tickets and provide weather and other information from Web sites.
Journal Link: Join an on-line discussion about the future of electronic banking at The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition at wsj.com
"Dow Jones News Service"
"Copyright(c) 1997, Dow Jones & Company, Inc." |
