Last year, companies looking to bring electronic bill presentment and payment in-house had very few viable options. Today, however, there are dozens of products available to help billers with the major functions. The process has several distinct steps. Solutions must first enroll payees, which generally works like any other online enrollment or registration process. Systems must notify enrolled payees of bills, present the bills themselves, and process the payments. Behind the scenes, however, these systems must first extract the billing data for enrolled payees from your existing accounting systems, and provide tools to design the online presentation of bills.

Partnering with Doculabs, we've evaluated electronic bill presentment and payment suites from eight vendors: Alysis, BlueGill, BroadVision, Edocs, Just in Time Solutions, Sun-Netscape, Northern Trust/Bottomline Technologies, and TriSense Software. Overall, we were impressed with how much this market has matured. Each of the products we evaluated offers a viable solution to businesses looking to start their own E-billing process.

More interestingly, each product offers a different approach and addresses different parts of the E-billing process, so it's important to get a handle on each system's strengths and best uses. Despite claims that some solutions handle the entire electronic bill presentment and payment life cycle, most require the integration of third-party tools to handle certain aspects of the process--especially payment processing.

Of course, there are other players in this market that have not yet gone through our evaluation process. For example, Novazen offers an electronic bill presentment and payment system that lets billers integrate data from multiple applications or billing systems into consolidated statements for individual customers. Oracle offers iBill & Pay, which is built on top of the Oracle database and is limited to the Sun Solaris server platform.

Some vendors have focused on providing messaging-based systems for document delivery, as opposed to presenting bills via Web sites. For example, MicroVault offers a system for secure and private document delivery of bills, statements, and trade confirmations. NetDelivery also offers a messaging-based system that delivers bills to users' in-box clients.

Some vendors are offering software and services in combination. For example, Interface Systems provides the eBill Bridge system for data parsing, extraction, and conversion, but can also act as a biller service provider. M&I Data Services provides electronic bill presentment and payment capabilities as part of its CSF composition software engine, and has also partnered with TransPoint to provide pay-anyone services.

In the software camp, vendors are clearly evolving their systems to handle more of the E-billing process--whether through their own technology or through formal partnerships with other vendors.

Some of the electronic bill presentment and payment software vendors are beginning to realize that few companies will deploy E-billing in isolation, and will instead insist that

E-billing be just one part of a total E-commerce and customer-service presence. Those electronic bill presentment and payment vendors that also offer E-commerce and customer-relationship management--or that can partner with other vendors that do--will be best positioned to actually deliver on the strategic promise of electronic billing.

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