CheckSpace Extends E-Payment Service To Small Businesses

CheckSpace Inc. has released an E-payments platform designed to let financial institutions offer electronic invoicing and checking to their small-business customers, and share the revenues with CheckSpace.

While many banks now let consumers pay their bills electronically, few have extended the service to the small-business market. To that end, the 1-year-old CheckSpace has integrated its offering with the financial systems that small businesses use, like QuickBooks and PeachTree, so that customers can create electronic checks, download data, and create reports in the accounting software they normally use. Perhaps not surprisingly for a company whose CEO is an ex-Microsoft developer, the system is the first E-payments solution built on Microsoft's .NET enterprise servers.

CheckSpace charges the user 95 cents per transaction, which it shares with its bank customers, though CEO Naseem Tuffaha declined to say exactly how the money is divvied up.

Tuffaha sees alliances with banks as his winning strategy in the battle for market share against PayPal Inc., a company that started out as a person-to-person E-payments system but has come to dominate the business market as well. Because PayPal customers keep their money in a PayPal account and are paid interest, the service competes with banks, Tuffaha says. CheckSpace, on the other hand, adds and deducts transactions directly into the customer's bank or checking account.