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

To: Benny Baga who wrote (3541)	4/26/1998 2:45:00 PM
From: jjs_ynot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8545

>>> wait until this ACH revolution takes place I guess I'm just a little out of it. ACH is what? I could guess Automated Check Handling but that's probably wrong.

To: Benny Baga who wrote (3541)	4/27/1998 7:37:00 AM
From: Benny Baga	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 8545

Banking on Tribeca Billing Service April 27, 1998 Where do companies go when they need to seek new revenue streams after their products begin to mature? To banks, of course. Oracle Corp. plans to introduce an electronic bill payment and presentment system, code-named Tribeca, in the second half of this year. Tribeca will compete head to head with technologies from IBM and Microsoft Corp. and services from firmly entrenched CheckFree Corp. However, the technology for implementing Tribeca is far simpler than getting companies and banks to commit to it. Mighty Microsoft has only had partial luck with MSFDC, its joint venture with bill processing giant Financial Data Corp. MSFDC is a fee-based service, which some companies and banks shy away from. Oracle, on the other hand, plans to sell the software and technology and let the companies and banks implement them to their liking. Anyone who does direct billing will be interested in Tribeca. Oracle officials say that this is a $1 billion industry and more than 200,000 companies are potential customers of this technology. Savings all around Although prices have not been set, the service will pay for itself even if only a small percentage of a company's customer base signs up for Tribeca. Billers save on paper-bill processing fees, curtail late payments and eliminate undeliverable mail. Banks, in turn, get better interaction with their customer bases, and consumers can get a better grasp on where their money is going. Tribeca requires banks and billers to run Oracle8 and the Oracle Application Server 4.0, which will ship in June. Tribeca, which is written entirely in Java, installs as an Oracle cartridge. Although banks are not a required part of the Tribeca equation, they make life a lot easier for the consumer. Unfortunately, Oracle only has about 30 percent penetration into large banks. Tribeca-enabled banks will act as bill consolidators. Consumers can get single consolidated statements from these banks and also will be able to write electronic checks, a la CheckFree. If the banks are not part of the picture, consumers will be forced to visit each biller individually. The information between the biller and the bank is handled through OFX, the Open Financial Exchange, a joint technology created by Intuit Inc. and Microsoft to facilitate data exchange between banks and client software. Other initiatives in this area are IBM's Gold (also supported by Tribeca), which is an exchange technology adopted by Integrion Financial Network, a consortium spearheaded by IBM and 16 banks. Gold is more flexible than OFX but far less pervasive. Most large banks cater to their customers and will probably end up implementing all three technologies--Tribeca, MSFDC and CheckFree. But volume sales reside with direct billers, including the cable companies, telcos and utilities. They'll probably choose only one technology, and the field is wide open. <<PC Week -- 04-27-98>> [Copyright 1998, Ziff Wire]