Spectrum would route electronic bills among billers, banks, and consumers. Unlike CheckFree’s end-to-end business model, the Spectrum switch was designed to let banks work with a variety of solution providers, allowing each to handle part of the overall billing cycle. Spectrum would allow billers to offer increased payment choices and support multiple payment processors and distribution channels, a capability that was demanded by billers, but was not offered by CheckFree or TransPoint. It would enable the bank consortium to support more robust functions, including routing and assured delivery of bills and payments between member banks, real-time “good funds” payments, direct settlement, and rich electronic remittance between member banks.
Spectrum would also have an integrated customer claims and dispute resolution system, and
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would be scalable beyond a billion annual transactions, with 99.98 percent availability.
Spectrum widened its membership to more than twenty banks, and it planned to begin operating in late 2000. These plans, however, did not materialize, and all three Spectrum founding members continued to use CheckFree as their Payments processor. Yet, in 2001, Spectrum was a major player CheckFree had to contend with.