Electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) has become such an important aspect of customer care that many traditional telecom billing vendors are acquiring or partnering with EBPP software suppliers. And the importance of providing real-time billing information via the Internet will only grow as service providers introduce more value-added, transaction-based offerings.
E-billing has become critical from a customer care standpoint as a way to drive down carrier costs. Directing customers to self-service portals on the Internet rather than to customer service representatives can keep the use of this more costly resource in check for service providers.
"Virtually all telecom service providers have evaluated, if not implemented, EBPP," says Paul Hughes, director of billing and payment applications strategies research at the Yankee Group (www.yankeegroup.com).
As a result, there's been significant consolidation in the billing industry in recent months, much of which has been focused on the integration between traditional billing and EBPP vendors.
Avolent Inc. (www.avolent.com , formerly Just in Time solutions) acquired Solant Inc. (www.solant.com). Hughes says the new entity combines Avolent's strength in standardization and business-to- consumer with Solant's customer care focus and more robust e-CRM and web self-service functions. In addition, Portal Software Inc. (www.portal.com) and Avolent have partnered to do joint marketing.
CheckFree Corp. (www.checkfree.com) bought TransPoint LLC (www.transpoint.com), both of which are heavy into payment processing. And in 1999, CheckFree acquired BlueGill Technologies Inc., an EBPP software supplier. Daleen Tech- nologies Inc. (www.daleen.com) acquired Inlogic Software Inc. for its eCare platform. In addition, AMDOCS (www.amdocs.com) and its Solect Technology Group (www.solect.com) division added e-billing capabilities into its products.
The year 2000 was not only one of acquisition for the EBPP industry, but also a year of rebranding and quiet retooling, notes Hughes. Many traditional business-to- consumer EBPP vendors began to redirect their sights toward the burgeoning business-to-business marketplace. Yankee Group believes that 2001 will be the breakout year for business-to-business electronic invoice presentment and payment, with the small to medium-sized business being the first targets of traditional business-to- consumer entities.
"Generally, e-billing was a generic term and, as more competition [occurred] in this space, companies had to create new identities to separate themselves from the competition," says Hughes.
It has recently become clear that EBPP should have different functionality depending on whether it's a business-to-consumer or business-to-business application.
"B2B is more electronic invoice presentment and payment. B2C is more consumer-focused. For consumers, you need customer care, online marketing and potentially cross-selling and upselling," says Hughes. "With B2B, you need more robust presentment capabilities, being able to interact more with the online document. Accounts receivable departments need to see it and print it out, they don't care about marketing. It should be easy to read, tie in with a company's business accounting software, etc."
To date, consumer adoption of EBPP has been slow, estimated by Yankee Group at 5 to 6 percent in the United States in 2000. Hughes says there are a lot of retarding forces, like user access to a PC and broadband Internet connection, as well as security concerns.
But the new focus is on reaching businesses with EBPP or electronic invoice presentment and payment (EIPP). And Hughes expects small and medium-sized businesses to be the center target here. That's because processes of this group are much simpler than that of large businesses, so new systems and procedures are much easier to implement.
