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New Ways to Pay Bills via E-Mail

International Billing Services and CheckFree will let you pay bills online without a bank. You can forget about checking your mailbox, but don%squott forget to check your in-box.

By Lisa Moskowitz, PCWorld   

International Billing Services (IBS) will team up with CheckFree Corporation to provide customers of IBS clients the ability to view their bills via the Web, then pay them using CheckFree%squots E-Bill service.

To use E-Bill, you would go to the CheckFree Web site each month when your bills would normally arrive in the mail. After entering an encrypted password, your statements would be displayed on the screen. You could then pay your bills with the click of a button using CheckFree or a participating bank%squots electronic payment application.

Online billing sounds convenient, but what happens if you forget to check the CheckFree site?

%dquotThere is an e-mail notification,%dquot said Jorge Martin, IBS product manager. %dquotBut you do have to log on and people who don%squott go online that much will have to adjust their way of thinking.%dquot

Instead of checking your mailbox, you%squotll have to get used to checking your in-box or the Web site.

CheckFree charges $9.95 per month for up to 15 payments, and $2.49 for each additional payment. The average number of monthly household bills and statements is 17, Martin said. Different financial institutions offer electronic bill-paying in conjunction with electronic banking, for fees that range from free to $7 for 20 bills per month--in other words, for less than 35 cents per bill.

For those worried about security, both IBS and CheckFree use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security when transferring statement data via the Internet.

By moving to electronic billing, IBS is responding to the growing online banking community. According to a report issued by Jupiter Communications, 4.5 million U.S. households are projected to engage in online banking by the end of 1997. By 2000, Jupiter expects that number to increase to 13.1 million.

%dquotWe hope to migrate as many statements as necessary online,%dquot said Martin. %dquotHow quickly this is adopted is really a crapshoot at this point.%dquot

IBS creates and sends out more than 70 million billing statements to consumers monthly on behalf of telecommunications, utilities and financial institutions, and companies like Federal Express. Many banks, like Citibank and Bank of America, use CheckFree to process their customers%squot electronic bill payments. More than 1.3 million home banking and bill payment consumers use CheckFree.

IBS will pilot the new service with one of its customers this fall. General availability is expected in the first quarter of 1998.