Ring In The Changes - Online
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday July 7, 1998
You can pay your phone bill via the Net, but what about online bill presentation? It's coming, writes SUE LOWE .
IN the two weeks since announcing its Internet bill payment service, Telstra said 188 phone bills have been paid online - roughly doubling the rather paltry 10 transactions that on average go through Telstra's SureLink e-commerce gateway each day.
Telstra's Bill.Pay product manager, John Greigg, admitted that a big part of the incentive for putting bill payment online was to increase traffic to SureLink.
Since launching SureLink last October, 25 merchants had joined, 5,000 buyers had opened accounts and about 2,000 transactions had been carried out, Greigg said.
Greigg expected most early adopters of the Bill.Pay service would come from the 15 per cent of Telstra customers using the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service to pay bills via credit card over the phone.
But according to Tim Elliott, marketing director of First Data Resources Australia (FDRA), the largest independent provider of electronic funds transfer and credit card processing services in Australia, real growth in online bill payment is not likely to happen until bills are presented via the Internet as well as being payable via the Net.
"You have to complete the circle," said Elliott.
FDRA is the company that provides the back-end link between SureLink and the financial institutions, but its US parent, First Data Corporation, has a joint venture with Microsoft in the US for both bill presentment and payment.
Elliott said the Microsoft/First Data Corporation (MSFDC) development was at beta test stage in the US and was not likely to be introduced to Australia until early next year.
"My guess is that it is six to 12 months away here," he said.
While Telstra has been working on online bill presentment - the project was one of the first major Java projects in Australia - Greigg said it was a separate project to bill payment. He could not say when bills would be available online.
The main benefit of Bill.Pay for bill payers, he said, was that once they had registered their credit card details with SureLink, the process would be faster than the average three minutes it takes to use the IVR phone service.
While SureLink had initially considered introducing a transaction charge of 20c over time, Greigg said "they have moved away from that. We certainly won't introduce a transaction fee to customers for Bill.Pay."
Payment of other merchant bills, such as utility, rent and insurance, would be added over time. Greigg said the attraction for merchants was that it was cheaper than providing a 1300 number for phone payment.
"We have had a fair amount of interest from existing merchants using Telstra's IVR bill payment services . . . including Energy Australia," Greigg said.
In the US, MSFDC (www.msfdc.com) is promoting its secure electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) product to banks and billers in a way that allows them to brand it as one of their own services. Under the US system transaction fees are charged only to the biller, not the bank or the consumer paying the bill. The fees are not disclosed. Elliott said it was too early to say whether the same charging structure would be used here.
Telstra's Bill.Pay and eventually the MSFDC system would both be competing with the BPay electronic bill payment service supported by Australia's four major banks and four smaller regional banks.
BPay, which already has more than 200 merchants registered, is also being converted from an IVR phone service to an Internet-based service.
Westpac has said it expects to add BPay to its retail Internet banking service this month.
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald