Norcross, Ga.-based CheckFree Corp., the nation's leading provider of electronic bill payment services to banks, announced a new product this week that lets billers replace their paper bills with e-mail versions.

Some 275 banks, brokerages and portals currently offer CheckFree's WebPay service, which lets retail customers pay their bills electronically.

In addition, some 222 billers, including credit card issuers and utility companies, already offer electronic versions of their bills or will soon start. Currently, customers have to visit a bank or biller Web site to see their bills.

With the new e-mail service, announced at the Internet World Spring 2001 conference, customers will receive their bills as e-mail, with easy "click-to-pay" functionality.

"It's much more convenient than anything else available to consumers," said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

According to CheckFree spokesman Tim Renshaw, consumers who currently pay bills electronically through a CheckFree customer such as Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp. or Santa Clara, Calif.-based Yahoo Inc. will have the option of choosing to receive e-mailed bills as soon as their banks or portals upgrade to the latest version of WebPay.

Upgrade costs vary, Renshaw said, but they could be as little as a few thousand dollars for IT and planning for users of the later versions of the product.

"If they're moving from an older version, there might be data migration, which requires more work," he said.

For billers that want to be part of the system, the costs to convert paper bills to electronic form could range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, Renshaw said. Although few billers see significant cost savings, they gain in experience, he noted.

Part of the reason is that few consumers are ready for electronic bills, analysts said.

"At this point, the market isn't that developed yet," said Beth Robertson, an analyst at TowerGroup in Needham, Mass. And it may be a while before it is, she added. "Ten percent of all consumer bills will be presented and paid electronically by 2005," she said.

But some billers are focusing on the fact that the numbers are rising. Tom Hopkins, a spokesman for AT&T Corp., another CheckFree customer, said that online bill payment is a growing trend.

"More and more people are choosing the e-billing option," he said, although he couldn't release the company's customer numbers.

Bank of America is the nation's leader in electronic banking, with 3.1 million online customers, or 21% of all of its checking customers.

Of those, 800,000 pay their bills electronically, said spokeswoman Linda Mueller. The bank currently offers electronic bills on its Web site as a customer convenience.

"More and more customers are choosing to pay their bills online," she said. "The next logical step would be bill presentment. As more and more billers come online, more and more consumers will choose to receive their bills that way."

In addition, Bank of America is also a major credit card issuer and looks at e-mail presentment as a potential future cost savings, Mueller said. But neither the online banking nor credit card customers will be seeing e-mailed bills in the immediate futuure, she said.

"Our platform is new, we just completed rolling it out last month," she said. "Right now, we're just focused on increasing customer awareness."

Computerworld

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