* Support for standards—specifically open and interactive financial exchanges.

* Ability to integrate to legacy systems via print-stream conversion. This is important if you have advanced function presentation, Xerox Metacode or other print stream as the only way to retrieve billing data.

* Modern Internet technology. Look for Java and XML-based solutions because they attract the best developers and are best geared for scalability and performance.

Unless you are engaging in business-to-business EBPP, your ROI is going to be slim. The primary reason is low consumer adoption, which will increase slowly over time. A better approach is to understand the business implications of implementing this type of application: addressing the high-value Internet-centric customer base, providing better levels of customer service, adding the ability for cross-sell and up-sell and using an EBPP service to be competitive with similar companies in your industry. A recent Gartner Group report indicates that many billers are deploying EBPP for potential revenue creation (selling more products and services to online customers via an interactive electronic bill) and for competitive advantage.


Q: I am a student studying for a master’s in business administration from a Top 20 school, and I used my summer internship to work on an EBPP rollout for a highly respected e-commerce company in Austin, Texas. Where do you see the best opportunities for employment as a result of the EBPP revolution? What do you think are the most attractive areas of focus for EBPP startups?
A: The best employment opportunities appear to be in technology and service companies related to the EBPP industry. This includes EBPP software players, service bureaus or ASPs, and banking spinouts (such as WingspanBank.com) that are investing heavily in creating successful lines of business. The most attractive areas for startups are, of course, in the same areas. There are also going to be opportunities in consultancies specializing in e-commerce solutions as EBPP becomes a recognized part of an overall solution for a financial services organization, telecommunications company, utility or manufacturer.


Q: We have 55 possible bill overlays on our bill statement. This has created a problem for our EBPP vendor to support. Our vendor has solved the issue by hard coding our bill. I view this as a maintenance nightmare and have held up the project. Is this a common problem for the EBPP vendors? Or is our bill statement too complex for EBPP to work?
A: Complexities in the print stream are often difficult to tackle. This is one of the reasons that both vendors and billers prefer to get billing data farther upstream if at all possible, where the billing data has not yet been merged with the printer formatting content. Good billing solutions that provide print-stream conversion provide a function called flattening whereby all the overlays in the print stream are processed and the resulting output looks like the printed bill. From there, data elements are defined. By flattening the print stream prior to manipulation, you can avoid many of the challenges around overlays. There is never a good reason to hard code a bill, which will cause significant problems in maintaining and enhancing the bill. Look for functionality in your EBPP solution that encompasses these capabilities.