InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 30, 1998
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On the consolidation side, IBS has partnerships with both CheckFree and TransPoint. For payment, IBS partners with both CyberCash and CheckFree. Electronic Billing has a similar fee structure as IBS's paper-based billing services, in which the company charges a fee based on the number of bills delivered.
IBS has a good strategy, and its position in the EBPP market is enviable. The company can offer its existing customer base a natural migration to online billing services, complete with biller branding. IBS can also act as a biller service provider, so if the biller wants to work with multiple consolidators, IBS will take care of all the details.
Since IBS is a leader in the market, it may attract large billers that feel their current service bureaus aren't getting into the EBPP market fast enough.
NetDelivery
NetDelivery provides a combined software and service offering called Electronic Delivery Management that's designed to provide the electronic equivalent of a post office box. The EDM server component takes formatted bill data from billers or, more likely, consolidators, and simply delivers the bill to the NetDelivery eWizard client software--which requires the user to have the client software installed.
The system guarantees the security and integrity of the message, and logs all activities, including whether a bill was received, when it was first opened and read, and what actions were taken. This enables billers to easily determine the status of particular bills.
EDM is aimed at any company that wants to be able to deliver documents electronically in a secure manner. Most likely, this would be used by a consumer service provider such as a bank or a service bureau such as IBS. In fact, IBS uses the system as an alternate method to provide electronic bill presentment to its customers.
The company's most noteworthy deployment is a pilot with the Canadian Post Corp., in which NetDelivery and Cebra (a Canadian digital commerce solutions provider) are creating an Electronic Post Office Box (EPOB) for every Canadian. But in Canada, the information required to send electronic payments is already centralized; things are more complicated in the United States, where there is no centralized system for tracking billers and payment information.
Overall, we felt NetDelivery had some difficulty in clearly explaining exactly what it sells--and what its value proposition is.
Pitney Bowes
As an extension of its core offerings, Pitney Bowes offers D3, an integrated print/mail solution for large billers that includes electronic billing. The company aims D3 at large billers (typically more than 1 million bills per month). Using the same technology and infrastructure, D3 can distribute bills via mechanisms such as paper, fax, E-mail, and the Web. Pitney Bowes demonstrated the solution for us, and it seems to make great sense for billers that require a combination of different distribution options. No matter which option is used, Pitney Bowes provides granular tracking of bills throughout the process.
D3 integrates several existing technologies from Pitney Bowes, including StreamWeaver, the Electronic Inserter, the Router Instruction Processor, the Interactive Document Presentment Server, and the Document Processing Server. For other components, Pitney Bowes has used a best-of-breed approach, incorporating technologies from third parties such as @Work Technologies. For payment, D3 will send the biller's merchant bank a daily transaction file for payment processing via an ACH transaction. The end result is an integrated print-electronic presentment system.
Pitney Bowes has a strong overall solution that will appeal to large billers that want to continue to provide bills in printed as well as electronic formats. The company also can do as much or as little as the biller requires. For example, Pitney Bowes can provide off-site hosting of the data, or it can build systems and provide facilities and operations management services for those billers that want to keep their billing operations within their walls--allowing billers to brand the sites in either case. This gives Pitney Bowes' offering more flexibility than the services of competitors such as Bell & Howell.
TransPoint
TransPoint (formerly known as MSFDC) is a joint partnership between Microsoft, First Data Corp., and Citibank. TransPoint competes with CheckFree as a provider of biller consolidation services for electronic bill payment and presentment.
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