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

To: KW Wingman who wrote (5500)	5/17/1999 4:38:00 AM
From: Harry Franks	Respond to of 20297

Article on New York Times site regarding bill payment: LINK: nytimes.com Title: Interest in Online Bill Payment Grows Quote: Among the companies competing to bring more billers online are the Checkfree Corporation, the industry leader so far, and Transpoint, a joint venture of Microsoft, First Data and Citigroup. As billing agents, Checkfree and Transpoint work with companies like BellSouth and Consolidated Edison to deliver their bills online and with banks to work out the online payment process. Transpoint and Checkfree are racing to create partnerships with the biggest billers, such as electric utilities, credit card companies and mortgage lenders. Checkfree's early lead in the field comes in part from its having started sooner, in early 1997; the company says it has signed up many of the nation's top billers, including GTE, Chase Credit Card and MCI Worldcom. Both Checkfree and Transpoint are also signing partnerships with banks, so that a customer can visit his or her own bank's Web site and view and pay the bills of every company signed up by either billing agent. Since banks have offered various types of proprietary online bill-payment services for years, consumers can be expected to gravitate first toward bank Web sites to view and pay their bills. But stiff competition for the banks is on the way from portal Web sites, the gateways to the Internet that are visited by millions of Internet users each month. Though no portal deals have been made public, analysts say Checkfree and Yahoo have reached an agreement for Yahoo visitors to receive and pay the bills issued by each of Checkfree's merchant partners. (Yahoo and Checkfree declined to comment on the deal.) "This technology is unbelievably sticky," Robert Sterling, a Jupiter Communications analyst, said, using industry jargon for features that keep viewers coming back to a particular site. Customers who pay bills on one site will not only return out of habit, Sterling said, but will be reluctant to learn another site's system. With tens of billions of bills mailed in the United States each year, at least millions of repeat site visits could be at stake. "This is potentially a King Midas technology," Sterling said.