CheckFree i-Solutions, a subsidiary of CheckFree Corporation (Nasdaq: CKFR), today announced that the Sweden-based biller service provider (BSP), Atos Origin Sweden AB (formerly SchlumbergerSema), has further expanded its European electronic billing services offering. Supported by the market-leading CheckFree i-Series platform, Atos Origin Sweden now provides electronic billing services to one of the largest pan-European telecommunications operators and one of Sweden's major banks, with expertise in both business and consumer markets.
When Atos decided to add electronic billing to its traditional print and mail services early in 2002, the company looked at several leading systems integrators as well as the two leading software products on the market. CheckFree and its technology partner, Emitto Nordic, weighed in with several major advantages.
"We chose Emitto Nordic as our systems integrator because they offered the best service, and CheckFree i-Solutions was another obvious choice with the leading electronic billing software product in the world," said Roger Wrede, Head of e-Billing Business/Output Services at Atos Origin Sweden. "We believed CheckFree's experience working with leading billers and its history of solid successes would be a major advantage when dealing with the complexities of developing our billing service provider solution for major billing clients across Europe. The i-Series software platform was sophisticated yet flexible, easy to work with, and it easily integrated into our existing archiving systems."
Rolling out across Europe
Atos began implementation of the CheckFree i-Series biller service provider e-billing system in March 2002. Two months later it went live with its first customer, a Swedish bank. By June, the service was being rolled out to a select customer base of Atos' second major biller, one of Europe's leading alternative fixed and mobile telecommunications companies. Atos' e-billing service was soon extended across Europe, starting with telecommunication clients in Germany. Now customers in Austria, Spain and Italy are also receiving electronic bills, with a French service currently under development. Altogether, the Atos e-billing service will soon be available to almost 10 million business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) telecommunication customers across five countries, which is half of its total customer base. The entire Atos electronic billing infrastructure is run from a single central data centre based in Sweden.
Value-added services for business
Although initially focused on B2C subscribers, Atos' electronic billing service has become increasingly focused on the telecommunications B2B market, enabled by the comprehensive suite of CheckFree i-Series business support tools. For telecommunications end-users, these value-added services include corporate hierarchy mapping and split-billing, rapidly customisable invoice summary layouts, flexible data access and accounts payable workflow tools. Atos will expand its business-enabled e-billing, not just in the telecommunication industry but across a range of industries from financial services and manufacturing to distribution and retail. Other billers signing up to the Atos service include a large manufacturing company that issues a high volume of invoices to retailers globally. Each of these invoices can contain thousands of line items relating to component purchases, making electronic billing and its bundled services highly attractive to B2B customers.
Electronic Billing and Payment for online banks
Atos is also staking a claim in Europe's fast-growing e-billing market for Internet banks. Its flagship financial services customer is one of Sweden's largest banks with 6.5 million customers - over a third of which are online banking users. In addition to handling the bank's print-based invoices, Atos has been hosting the bank's electronic billing and payment service for the past 18 months. Central to this back-end service is CheckFree's powerful i-Series BSP server, which is also connected to Sweden's other major Internet banks. This arrangement gives customers the freedom to pay their major credit cards and a range of other bills from any e-bank portal in the country.
Archiving goes electronic
Another popular offering is Atos' invoice retrieval service, powered by a real-time archiving solution. Traditionally this service has been available for printed invoices only, but with CheckFree i-Series' ability to integrate with legacy archive data, Atos can now harness its e-billing repository to provide a paperless solution that is both speedy and cost efficient.
"In just under two years, Atos Origin Sweden has developed a very sophisticated pan-European e-billing service with strong growth potential. Its pioneering Web-based services for banks in Sweden are another example of how the application of e-Billing and e-Statement technology for online banks can improve the customer experience," said Steve Wright, Director, Global Marketing for CheckFree i-Solutions. "CheckFree is proud to see that the i-Series technology is being applied so successfully within such a wide range of applications and looks forward to supporting Atos' far-reaching expansion plans into new markets."