Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : CheckFree Holdings Corp. (CKFR), the next Dell, Intel? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Biller who wrote (3762)	3/16/1999 11:40:00 AM
From: Paul S.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20297

CKFR and BLLS from WSJ Interactive >>CheckFree, for its part, claims to have signed up a quarter of the top 100 billers in the country and has been delivering bills over the Web for two years. If you do business with any of 23 billers at CheckFree's site (www.mybills.com/ebills), you can try it out. The company also says it has signed a deal with a big portal site -- it won't say which one -- to aggregate bills for consumers, and will use the Microsoft Network as well. Another bill consolidator in the presentment food chain is Billserv.com Inc., which will cater to small and medium-sized billers such as municipalities. Its eServ service went live earlier this month and the company is in the process of signing up its first customers. But it doesn't replace TransPoint and CheckFree; rather, Billserv hooks into CheckFree, signing billers that the latter would perhaps overlook with so many larger companies wanting in. Favorable presentment economics kick in when the biller sends 1,000 or more monthly bills -- and at 10,000 bills, the costs drop to 75 cents a bill, says David Jones, BillServ's senior vice president and founder. "It's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem," he says. "Billers need to be presenting, and won't put out their bills until they've got a lot of consumers requesting them. Consumers won't look at it until a lot of billers make it available." Perhaps so, there's hardly a large biller that isn't keenly aware of the potential and the competitive imperative that goes with it. CheckFree customer BancOne has been running a presentment pilot and will start offering its service to its retail banking customers next month, according to Bruce Luecke, president of BancOne's interactive delivery services. But adoption could be slow: Only 275,000 of BancOne's retail customers -- about 4% -- use online banking services, and only a third of those pay bills electronically.<<