ELECTRONIC BILL PAYMENT AND PRESENTMENT
How it Works
Electronic Bill Payment and Presentment typically required interaction among three key parties: the biller (say AT&T), the consumer, and the consumer’s financial institution. In many situations a fourth party, the bill payment service (like CheckFree), was also involved. Several implementation models were possible, but essentially, the consumer obtained Web access to an electronic copy of a bill and then authorized payment of that bill via a transaction from his or her bank.
In some cases, the transfer was made electronically between the consumer’s bank and the biller’s bank. For example, a consumer might visit AT&T’s Web site, view his or her bill, and then authorize the payment to be deducted from his or her checking account. In other cases, the consumer might visit the site of a bill payment service like CheckFree, view a biller’s bill, and authorize payment by paper check that was created and mailed by CheckFree. In other cases, the transfer involved some manual back-end effort. The paper billing statement may have needed to be scanned by CheckFree so it could be presented to the consumer electronically. Once the consumer authorized payment, CheckFree printed and mailed a paper check to the biller, if the biller could not be paid electronically.
Electronic bill payment often worked directly from the consumer’s bank.7 The consumer established with his or her bank a file of merchants and regularly used either a telephone or PC to direct the bank to make payments to the merchants in the list. The bank transferred funds through the bill payment service CheckFree in 85 percent of transactions — and onto the Automated Clearing House System (ACH) whenever possible. Initially, these services ran via a touch-tone telephone or a direct dial up modem connection. The consumer was linked to the bank’s system using proprietary client software, some of which was provided by CheckFree. With the emergence of the Web, however, electronic payment services migrated there.