Cambridge, MA, USA, May 24, 2000 Report published by Celent Communications
In 40-page report released today Celent Communications analyzes the nascent "scan and pay" bill presentment market in the USA. Despite widespread predictions that electronic bill presentment would be the next "killer" Internet application, the market has been at a virtual standstill for years -- in 1999, only 100,000 US households (0.1 percent) were using electronic bill presentment.
In the past year, however, scan and pay service providers have injected new life into the stagnant electronic bill presentment market. Using scanning, optical character recognition and form identification technologies, these providers essentially offer lockbox services to retail consumers, bypassing banks and billers to deliver 100 percent of a consumer痴 bills online for review and payment. These services have the potential to realize all of the convenience and cost savings that have been promised, but not delivered, by other providers of electronic bill presentment.
Members of Celent Communication痴 Retail Banking research service can download this report electronically by clicking on the icon to the right. A Table of Contents for this report can be viewed online.
In this report, "Scan and Pay Vendors: The Future of Electronic Bill Presentment," Celent Communications examines the consumer lockbox model (including the business process, technological underpinnings and economics of the model). The report provides an in-depth analysis of each of the three primary vendors of consumer lockbox services and assesses the prospects for the vendors, and for the consumer lockbox model as a whole, over time.
"We do not expect consumer lockbox providers to become major destination sites. For a variety of reasons, most notably consumer concerns about security and the expense and risk associated with providing lockbox services, we expect that the future of consumer lockbox providers will in large part be dependent upon their ability to create lucrative technology partnerships with other players in the electronic bill presentment market," explains Jody Cornish, an analyst in Celent Communications Retail Banking group.
"However, we also believe that a new, hybrid model of electronic bill presentment, which includes some lockbox processing, will emerge. Lockbox services will become an integral component of any viable electronic bill presentment offering."
