ELECTRONIC BILL PAYMENTS IN 2000
In 2000, a thousand banks offered Internet bank accounts, but although 93 million households had a banking relationship, less than 9 million online bank accounts had been opened by July 2000about half the number of online brokerage accounts.3 Electronic Bill Payment and Presentment (EBPP) was a feature of online banking. It was one of the more complex Electronic Commerce undertakings, requiring the coordination of a multitude of billers, banking institutions, software developers, and infrastructure providers. In addition to the complexity of delivery, consumers demanded a compelling and low-cost (ideally, free) offering. Both CheckFree and the banks were aggressively seeking to build their capability to service this market.
Early forms of electronic bill payments included preauthorized payments from the consumer’s bank account or consumer-initiated electronic payments from a computer running home banking software with a bill payment feature. Electronic bill payment was widely predicted to create economic and commercial incentives to billers and consumers, but it met with resistance from both groups. While preauthorized payments were convenient, consumers were reluctant to give up control of the timing and dollar amounts of their payments. With consumer-initiated electronic payments from a PC, the consumer retained control, but billers had to continue sending paper bills and the payments did not include all the information they desired. According to Tower Group, of the 18.7 billion bills paid in 1997, only 600 million were paid by preauthorized debits and 300 million were initiated from a PC or a phone.4 The vast majority of bills (17.8 billion) were paid by check. Indeed, Americans wrote 246 checks a year on average, several times the rate of other developed countries. Yet, consumers were slowly switching to electronic bill payments.
Adding a Web-based Bill Presentment function was expected to solve the inherent problem of electronic bill payment: it would take mailing and paper out of the process while leaving the consumer in control. Thus, consumers would be able to view and pay bills at the same time and in the same location. This “click to pay” capability was one of the great consumer value propositions of EBPP. Indeed, the absence of an integrated payments system with a “click to pay” feature was one of the reasons banks had been slow to use electronic payments as a delivery channel. With the new presentment capabilities, EBPP promised to be the next “Killer App” in financial services, and the market was forecasted to have rapid consumer take-up, increasing the number of EBPP-using households from less than one hundred thousand in 2000 to more than 15 million by 2003 (Exhibit 1).
CheckFree had a leading role in the EBPP market. By 2000, CheckFree had put together an end- to-end solution that provided it with market dominance, at a cost of $1.7 billion to acquire competing and complementary providers. CheckFree had achieved its position of dominance by a consistent strategy of acquiring or collaborating with competitors and service providers. In