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

To: Benny Baga who wrote (1907)	2/24/1998 5:04:00 AM
From: Roger Bass	Respond to of 8545

Benny, the comments from Mincy@Yahoo are mostly correct. The difficulty for banks in creating differentiation is less true now than it was. Now, the bank's internet pages are becoming increasingly part of the experience of banking within Quicken. And a Quicken-online-banking customer is likely to use the bank's internet service as well. Quicken / OFX service is then just one component of a bank's online offering, and even there, bank's can differentiate themselves through being faster to market with new service offerings, better integration, clever pricing, better leverage of cross-sell and personalised marketing opportunities etc etc. Integrion's charter was never (to the best of my knowledge) to create replacement front-ends, though NationsBank and Royal Trust (who bought MYM), may have had this as a glimmer in their eye. The main focus was on the back-end service business (ISC/CheckFree) in a business environment where it looked like Microsoft might control all that. I agree that banks have a general concern about the scope of Microsoft's ambition. However, in a (broadly) open standards environment, where banks can choose their service provider and customers can choose their front-end, the risk is reduced. (Open standards can become less open though if one player becomes dominant in multiple links of the chain).