AT&T, Intuit and Just In Time Solutions today at Billing 98 in Atlanta announced support for the Open Internet Billing (OIB) model for providing billing, customer care and other services via the Internet. OIB is revolutionary as it is the only model that utilizes open standards and carefully balances the needs of both billers and consumers. Previously, there was no Internet billing model that gave billers complete control over their bill data while allowing consumers a single site at which to pay their bills Ð a dilemma that has been stalling the rapid adoption of online bill presentment and payment.
At the heart of the OIB model is the Open Financial Exchange standard for bill presentment, which defines an industry format and protocol for exchanging financial information and managing financial transactions, such as bill presentment and payment, over the Internet. Open Financial Exchange was co-developed by Microsoft, Intuit and CheckFree, with contributions on the bill presentment chapter from Just In Time. By bringing standardization to the electronic billing industry, it maximizes a biller's flexibility to send bills through consolidators. Consolidator Web sites, such as a home banking Web site or Intuit's Quicken.com, enable consumers to receive and pay bills through one user interface.
"Consumers, businesses and service providers have been anticipating the advent of on-line billing as a viable means to simplify the provisioning, billing and customer care process," said Boyd Peterson, director of consumer communications at The Yankee Group. "The benefits of online billing to the user and the providers alike are significant. Open Internet Billing provides an ideal solution to meet the needs of all the interested parties. The users get a platform that consolidates the billing process, and the billers retain control of communication with the customer."
The "Thin Consolidator Model"
While the use of Open Financial Exchange provides OIB with a standard for biller/consolidator communication, the "Thin Consolidator Model" enables OIB to balance both consumers' desires and billers' needs. With Thin Consolidator-based billing, consumers go to one consolidated Web site to view a list of their bills and to pay them. They are seamlessly and securely linked to the biller's Web site from the consolidator's site to view bill details, interact with the bill and engage in self-service inquiries, sales and other activities. This unique feature allows billers to deploy and control meaningful customer care applications while providing the convenience of bill consolidation.
In a key departure from other online billing systems, the OIB model enables billers to serve their own detailed bills directly to consumers. This feature of OIB enables the critical one-to-one relationship between the biller and customer, and importantly, it ensures the privacy of data. In comparison, other systems require that billers transmit sensitive bill data directly to the consolidator, which raises issues about data security and further distances billers from their customers.
"Internet Billing will succeed by satisfying key objectives of both the consumer and the biller," said Frank Delfer, CIO, consumer division of AT&T. "The consumer requires a solution that is convenient and easy to use. The biller wants to maintain communications and marketing control. Open Internet Billing provides a foundation for satisfying both the consumer and biller," added Delfer.
The Biller's Perspective
The industry for bill presentment via the Internet is expanding, creating a critical need for a standard way for billers and consolidators to interface. Today, to reach its broad customer base, a biller might need multiple consolidators, who could be using differing protocols and data formats. This situation forces billers to implement proprietary systems, which is costly and hampers the growth of the industry. With OIB, however, a biller implements one Open Financial Exchange (OFX) server and reuses this functionality regardless of which consolidators their customers are using.
The Consolidator's Perspective
The OIB model benefits consolidators by encouraging billers to invest in online billing services. This creates a greater number of potential customers for consolidators. They are not trapped into using a single proprietary technology that only a subset of the marketplace has adopted. In turn, relationships with more billers translates into more consumers using the consolidators' sites.
The Consumer's Perspective
Consumers are interested in convenient consolidation of bills and full service. The same holds true for billing and customer support services. They are not interested in a technology model like OIB per se, but they are best served by one. The use of OIB allows a customer to receive a biller-optimized online bill that is easily readable and similar to a paper bill. Furthermore, a thin consolidator allows a consumer to take full advantage of all the biller developed care and interactive functionality that is only available at the biller site.
The Bill Presentment Perspective
OIB presents a clear market opportunity for the bill presentment industry. If consumers demand consolidation of bills and there is more than one consolidator, then the industry needs OIB to succeed. Utilizing open standards is the only way to achieve rapid parallel deployment in a new industry. OFX servers will translate, format and deliver summary billing information from billers to consolidators. OFX clients will receive summary billing information from billers, making it readily available for presentment to customers. Finally, the Open Financial Exchange standard will enable customers to pay their bills online, closing the billing loop.
