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Work Process Improvement Today, Dec 1998 by Lamm, David R

Trough the centuries, people have witnessed a number of technological inventions that have changed the course of human social history. In the area of communication, the Gutenberg printing press, along with low-cost, massproduced paper, revolutionized the distribution of knowledge and ideas during the Renaissance. More recently, the telephone and radio extended communication dramatically. At the end of the 20th century, the Internet joins these inventions.

It is interesting that the indelible marks left by these inventions were not always envisioned by their inventors. The printing press, for example, was invented primarily to massproduce the Bible, which until then had been slowly and painstakingly hand-lettered by monks. It evolved into the means for introducing reading and writing to the world at large, fostering the expansion of learning and education to the entire culture, not just to the elite.

Similarly, the Internet was developed to allow academicians and the military to easily share information between disparate computers over a web of networks around the world. It is just within this decade that we have witnessed its remarkable evolution into a global communication and electronic commerce channel. The Internet is transforming the way people communicate, do business and carry on their daily lives.

Businesses often struggle to anticipate how a new technology might affect what they do, or how they do it. Failure to recognize a new technology's impact can have disastrous results. During the first half of this century, railroads dominated transportation. Over the next 20 years, airlines began to compete for this business, eventually causing the demise of personal transportation by rail. The railroad companies saw themselves as being in the "railroad business." They failed to recognize that they were actually in the "transportation business." Today, we might be flying the B&O or the Union Pacific Airline if the railroads had adopted this new technology instead of ignoring it.

INCREDIBLE OPPORTUNITY FOR PAYMENT CENTERS

We are now at a similar crossroads in the payments world. Your payment center can continue to be merely a paper processing department. Or you can embrace payments of all kinds, including electronic payments, which are not the competition, nor are they irrelevant. The Internet is not a flash-in-thepan phenomenon. It is a juggernaut, and an incredible opportunity for payment centers.

Perhaps the biggest potential that the Internet holds is in the area of electronic commerce, specifically electronic payment. "If payment centers view the Internet as a threat, they are missing the boat," said Bob Weirauch, president of Wausau Financial Systems, a supplier of payment processing solutions. "If they see the vast opportunity, they will begin the process of building delivery systems early on."

Although the prevailing payment instrument today remains the paper check, within the next decade electronic payments will surely be at least as prominent as paperand perhaps even more important.

Today, there are many forms of electronic payments, but those completed over the Internet will provide the most convenience to the consumer, while requiring the least labor and delivering the lowest error rate to your payment center. The introduction of electronic bill delivery (EBD, along with the associated e-payment, allows the payment center to convert labor-intensive paper payments and `check-and-list' to error- and labor-free electronic payments.

In EBD, bills that would normally be printed and mailed are sent via e-mail or posted onto a Web site for viewing and paying. The entire experience for the customer is electronic. An electronic payment is conveniently made by merely clicking on a Pay button on the screen.

The e-payment returned to your payment center is always accompanied with the proper customer account and payment information. Thus, customers receiving e-bills are eliminated from check-and-list and exception handling. In fact, check-and-list customers are the most likely candidates for early adoption of EBD.

You should encourage the shift from paper to electronic billing and payment. Paper payments that become electronic are processed at a much lower labor cost and at a significantly lower error rate. EBD can bring even more value to your organization as a whole because it can drive the customer to your organization's Web site, where you can cross-sell additional products and services.

Is your payment center the proper location in the company for EBD? It would seem so. Since EBD can be viewed as a front-end to electronic payments (for each bill, there is an associated payment), you can drive electronic payments using electronic billing.

It is beyond the scope of this article to fully analyze the EBD application, but you may want to consider these questions before deciding on a strategy for your organization:

Should the bill be delivered using e-mail or be posted on a Web site?

How important is the ease of interface to the biller's legacy billing system?