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

To: Geof Hollingsworth who wrote (1905)	2/23/1998 2:36:00 PM
From: Benny Baga	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8545

>>> old higher-cost owned networks have been at a disadvantage. First, thanks for the great info. Second, I thought CheckFree was using the Internet for these transactions (in fact I'm sure they are). In the 1997 annual report CheckFree said it cost .01 cent per internet transaction. What am I missing?

To: Geof Hollingsworth who wrote (1905)	2/24/1998 11:59:00 AM
From: Roger Bass	Respond to of 8545

Geoff, I think CheckFree's private network costs will be going away fairly quickly - Quicken98 is internet only, (Money98 still allows banks to choose) so as the client software is upgraded, this will gradually go away. The real cost differences are between paper based payments (ie cutting a check) and electronic. It seems to me that MSFDC is not actually offering a pay any service to compete with CheckFree's (not 100% sure about this), so any bank that wants to offer this to their customers still would have to use CF (unless they have a vastly expensive in-house service, as some do). Re Benny's comment, the biller-initiated payment model is very common in Europe. I don't see though why this is such a fundamental difference between the CF and the MSFDC model - there's nothing to stop MSFDC initiating payments on behalf of billers based on the information from the billing run (even if they don't do this now), as CF does in some cases already. I see basically four different payment cases (and am not aware of any real differences here between MSFDC and CF, though they may exist) 1. customer clicks 'Pay' on biller processor's website, who initiates debit 2. customer clicks 'Pay' on biller's website, who initiates debit 3. customer clicks 'Pay' in client software (or bill consolidator website), which initiates a payment 4. customer authorises biller to issue recurring debits Note: 1 & 3 converge in the case where the biller's processor is the same as the customer's bill consolidator, as is often the case with CF (4) is widespread in Europe, and does seem to exist in the US, but I haven't heard too much about how it's done. Anyone have any info ? Roger.