CheckFree launched the first fully integrated Electronic Bill Payment and Presentment (EBPP) solution, E-Bill, in March 1997. E-Bill enabled billers to present bills electronically and to receive payments electronically. E-Bill was first implemented as a “thin” consolidator model, but was later extended to support the “thick” model and even a direct billing model. E-Bill enabled billers to track events related to presentation and payment, to dynamically adjust fields, and to draw consumers to specified URLs on their Web sites depending on bill summary data. In spite of these capabilities, CheckFree was a batch processing service because of its dependence on the ACH, which required two to four days to process transactions. CheckFree’s average cost of presenting a bill was 15 to 20 cents.
In 2000, CheckFree provided its customers online payment services through more than 250 partnerships with CSPs including banks, brokerage firms, credit unions, portals (including Yahoo!, America Online, and Microsoft Network), personal finance programs (including Quicken and Microsoft Money), and the U.S. Postal Service. CheckFree contracted with the CSPs to provide bill payment services on their Web sites, but the CSPs provided the brand. A visitor to Yahoo! ’s site, for example, might use “Yahoo! Bill Pay” without noticing the small CheckFree logo.
What the consumer did not see was the real value CheckFree had been providing for more than a decade—a formidable capacity to patch together diverse, non-standard, often incompatible receipt and payments systems across the country. The “electronic” payment of consumers’ bills was achieved only through a complex system of data processing, with paper backup for the highly fragmented system.
In most instances, CheckFree used the ACH system to transfer funds directly from the consumer’s account to the merchant. However, CheckFree provided the supporting data for the transfer even if the biller did not have the technology to accept it electronically. If a merchant could not accept electronic payments, it simply cut a paper check, drawing from the consumer’s bank account, and mailed it to the merchant. CheckFree also transmitted remittance information, which the ACH system was not equipped to process. In its role of helping each disabled party through the electronic payments process, CheckFree proved a versatile and reliable middleman whose reach could not be rivaled.
In 2000, approximately 58 percent of payments were in electronic form, up from 46 percent in 1999. Electronic payments were more desirable because of the direct cost of writing and mailing checks (an ACH-based payment cost CheckFree about 7 cents compared to 45 to 50 cents for a bill paid by check). In addition, the error rate for paper check payments was five times as high as for electronic payment, resulting in consumer disputes. The average direct cost of resolving such an error was about $25.
Service Quality
By 2000, CheckFree’s system was still too costly and complicated to appeal to many users. In spite of the growth in the number of affiliated major billers (Exhibit 3), the number was still relatively small, representing less than a quarter of the US billing market, which resulted in consumer frustration when using the service. To register with CheckFree, consumers had to get