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

To: Brooks Jackson who wrote (3535)	4/27/1998 12:38:00 AM
From: Eric Jacobson	Respond to of 8545

Brooks: Thanks to you and Benny Baga for providing some excellent answers. They helped a lot. I will contact my bank and CKFR to get the details on my situation. You made a couple of good points. First, automatic payments have been around for quite a while, yet most billers like my credit card company and cable company still don't use them. There must be a reason, but I'm not sure what it is. Even if a biller uses automatic payments, they stand to reduce their billing expenses by using E-bills, so this is likely to gain in popularity. On the cost savings associated with E-bills, I've been mulling this over for a couple of weeks. I figure it costs the biller at least $0.50-$0.60 to send a bill, it costs me around $0.50 to reply, it costs the biller and bank at least $0.20-$0.30 each to process my check. So, the whole transaction costs at least $1.50-$2.00 or so. Reducing these transactions costs to less than $0.10 makes a lot of sense, and that's why CKFR is attractive to me. You made a good point about individual billers using their own websites. This would be a hassle. I guess it does make sense to do it at one clearinghouse site. I just think my bank is being a little greedy by charging me $6/mo - so they skim $2 off the top AND reduce their own transaction costs. As for billers using CKFR, their website didn't list that many using it now. Are any of the popular billers - like Discover or Citibank - using E-bills now? Thanks again.