InformationWeek

November 30, 1998

Electronic Billing: Postage Due

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But Bell & Howell's approach loses some luster for organizations that are most interested in electronic-only delivery. The company's strategy currently revolves around retrofitting its existing systems to produce and track electronic bills instead of paper bills. Bell & Howell's larger challenge may be in trying to change the market's perceptions about the company's ability to keep up with the fast pace of change in the Internet world.

BlueGill Technologies
BlueGill Technologies was founded in 1996 with the sole purpose of developing Internet billing technologies and solutions. BlueGill's team comes from a mainframe and transactional print environment, with extensive knowledge of AFP data streams and DB2 databases.

BlueGill's 1to1Server is a data stream parsing engine and translation tool. The 1to1Server engine is designed to extract billing data from intelligent data streams, convert the billing data to one of several different formats (including XML, PDF, and ASCII), and store the information in a relational database. For creating presentation front ends, 1to1Server provides integration links to third-party Web application development tools such as Bluestone's Sapphire/Web.

BlueGill was one of the few vendors that had a commercially available product to show us. We installed the product in our labs, used the tool to extract data from a print stream, and built a sample BlueGill presentment application using the Bluestone Sapphire/Web application development environment.

BlueGill's product is solid and supports a large number of print streams, but it's cumbersome to use. Fortunately, the parsing rules for specific statements don't change very frequently, which will minimize the interaction that developers will have with the 1to1Server engine. Developers are insulated for the most part from the intricacies of the translation engine by a Web application development environment.

1to1Server doesn't provide any inherent capabilities for building one-to-one marketing applications. Creating such systems requires the use of third-party Web application environments.

1to1Server makes sense as a technology for organizations that are implementing the biller-direct model and developing their own EBPP applications in-house. It can also be used by integrators and consolidators.

In BlueGill's favor is the fact that it entered the market early with a quality parsing engine. But today, there are other parsing engines that are easier to use and that provide a host of other features. BlueGill will face challenges if parsing engines become a commodity, or if large integrators choose to develop their own engines instead of buying them.

CheckFree
CheckFree's primary goal is to provide bill consolidation and payment services to large billers, consumers, and financial institutions. The company's chief competitor in this space is TransPoint. CheckFree is already firmly established in the electronic-commerce world. The company has been offering payment services for more than 15 years and its home-banking and transaction-processing services are widely used by major financial institutions.

Creating EBPP applications for billers is almost always a custom job for CheckFree. The company provides services to accept data feeds from billers, format the data appropriately, host the data at CheckFree's data center, present it to users over the Web, and provide the back-end services to handle payment processing (although payment via credit card is not yet supported). EBPP sites can be branded with the biller's identity, including logos and marketing messages, so customers don't even realize that they are not at the biller's own site.

CheckFree also acts as a consolidator of data from multiple billers. Customers can log in to CheckFree's site, and in one location, access and pay all their bills. This becomes more attractive to customers as CheckFree adds more billers to the fold, increasing the likelihood that all of a customer's many bills are accessible through CheckFree. But billers lose the branding that they would otherwise have in a biller-direct or service provider model.