Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment
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PRODUCT OPPORTUNITY ASSESSMENT ELECTRONIC BILL PRESENTMENT AND PAYMENT TABLE OF CONTENTS BUSINESS PROBLEM STATEMENT .............................................................................................................. 1 THE MARKET OPPORTUNITY......................................................................................................................... 2 THE NETCENTER OPPORTUNITY.................................................................................................................. 4 TARGET CUSTOMERS ..................................................................................................................................... 5 SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS........................................................................................................................... 6 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE............................................................................................................................ 8 BUY/PARTNER OPTION: PARTNERING STRATEGY DISCUSSION ......................................................... 9 BUILD OPTION: ENGINEERING SCHEDULE AND RESOURCE PLAN................................................... 11 BUILD OPTION: FINANCIAL ANALYSIS...................................................................................................... 13 RECOMMENDATIONS .................................................................................................................................... 15 APPENDIX: TARGET CUSTOMERS ............................................................................................................. 16 APPENDIX: MARKET BACKGROUNDER.................................................................................................... 19 BUSINESS PROBLEM STATEMENT What is the key business problem that this product is supposed to address? Companies such as telco’s, utilities, retail stores and more are interested in finding effective ways to both provide improved customer service, as well as reducing their costs. One way to do both is with Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP). The on-line bill provides an opportunity for the company (the biller) to replace the expensive, static paper-based bill with a personalized, rich transactive presentment of the bill along with highly targetted cross-sell marketing and customer self-service access that also can significantly reduce billing costs and customer service/support costs. NETSCAPE COMMUNICATIONS 1 THE MARKET OPPORTUNITY What is the market and how big is the opportunity? MARKET DEFINITION Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) is an emerging market and the segments are not yet well established, however, there have been certain industries that have adopted the technology more readily than others, and there are certain approaches to the problem that have emerged. For purposes of discussion in this document, we define Electronic Bill Presentment as the electronic transmission of bill detail from businesses to consumers. It includes presentation of information, data analysis, cross selling, up selling, advertising and bill dispute. We define Electronic Bill Payment as the process of performing electronic payments between the consumer, the biller, and the financial institution. We define Direct Bill Presentment as the approach where billers create and present their electronic bills on its own website. We define Thin Consolidator Bill Presentment as when the biller’s summary data is provided to a bill consolidator that then presents the bill detail to the customer on demand. We define Thick Consolidator Bill Presentment as when the biller’s summary and detail data is provided to a bill consolidator, who then presents it to the customer. Please see the Appendix: Market Backgrounder for additional market definition information. MARKET ANALYSIS The EBPP industry is expected to be large due to the opportunity for major billers to save literally millions of dollars through improved cash management and other cost savings. In this document we predict the market opportunity through two approaches. First, we do a bottoms-up analysis based on target customers. Second, we look at the industry analysts for data on number of billing transactions and the rate of growth of the internet billing market. With respect to the bottoms-up analysis, we start with the following data of target customers (in US only): Banks Savings Credit Unions Telcos Utilities Insurance Institutions Small 8853 1633 11318 0 0 0 Medium 277 130 51 0 0 0 Large 398 161 23 26 74 56 Total 9528 1924 11392 26 74 56 If we just consider large US, direct biller customers, and only in the financial, telco, utility and insurance industries, there are over 700 target customers (we limit here to be conservative in our market size estimates). If we assume the average expenditure for these large customers is $1M (product license and services), and we assume a ramp over several years, we have the following market opportunity projections: NETSCAPE COMMUNICATIONS 2 Year 1998 1999 2000 2001 % who buy 10% 25% 35% 50% Market $70M $150M $220M $350M Opportunity We think the market is considerably larger, especially when considering the global opportunities, additional industries, add-on sales and maintenance, but for planning purposes we use these numbers here. The following industry references help to give us a sense of the market size. “We have identified at least 15 billion transactions that fit this market space. EBPP is at least a $1B to $1.5B industry, more if we include transaction fees. There are unnamed opportunities for advertising and cross-selling services.” - Gary Craft, Senior Research Analyst, Robertson, Stephens & Company “Savings from electronic bill presentment could net billers 75 cents to $1.25 per customer, per month. For a large biller with two million customers, even if only 10 percent of the customer base elects to receive their bills electronically, that’s a net benefit of anywhere from $2 million to $3 EBPP Market Opportunity 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 Number of Bills in (MMs) 17.8 18 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.5 18.6 18.7 18.8 18.9 19 Payable through Net (in MMs) 0.1 0.4 2.5 5 7 9 11 12 13 13.5 14 million a year.” - Bill Burnham, Senior Electronic Commerce Analyst, Piper Jaffray “By the year 2000, the number of bills being presented electronically could go as high as 10 million to 11 million.” - Gary Meshell, Director of Electronic Financial Services, Price Waterhouse NETSCAPE COMMUNICATIONS 3 THE NETCENTER OPPORTUNITY What is the applicability of this product to Netcenter? The BP team has been having ongoing discussions with the Netcenter team as we both explore the opportunities in the EBPP space. Netcenter has in fact several different opportunities, all of which so far appear to be very much in line with the requirements we are seeing from the rest of our target market. NETCENTER AS DIRECT BILLER There are several services that Netcenter would like to provide on-line billing for. These include advanced Netcenter membership subscription services, as well as new services such as on-line procurement that are planned for the future. For both of these, Netcenter is the direct biller, and wishes to provide the business or consumer customer with a tailored billing statement covering the products and services purchased and providing appropriate payment options. NETCENTER AS PORTAL Netcenter also of course has the opportunity to leverage its asset as a major industry portal to provide bill consolidator services. This bill consolidation feature could either be “branded” by Netcenter or a major Netcenter partner, such as one of the widely respected financial institutions. The thin-consolidator model is most appropriate here, although another approach could be the multi-hosted direct biller model, but this would require significantly more hosting capacity and in effect acts like the thick-consolidator model. The Netcenter team and BP team have shared preliminary plans, and the opportunity for APD to be the provider of EBPP software to Netcenter is very high. The timing is roughly compatible, and the requirements are very compatible. NETSCAPE COMMUNICATIONS 4 TARGET CUSTOMERS What types of customers are we interested in addressing, and who in particular would target? TARGET MARKETS Seven industries account for ninety-one percent of the consumer biller market. The combination of Auto and Housing Finance makes Financial Institutions the largest billers. In the chart below, utilities includes both telco’s and power and gas utilities. Periodical Health Care Legal 8% 18% 8% Other 9% Auto Finance Insurance 18% 12% Housing Finance Utilities 12% 15% EBPP by Industry TARGET CUSTOMERS Examples of customers that we are targeting with this product include utility companies, on-line service providers, insurance companies for health, auto and home, mortgage companies, automotive credit, general consumer credit card companies, savings & loans and credit unions, gasoline, department stores and other retailers, and health clubs. Specific customers that we have interviewed during the requirements definition and validation phase include the following: • Telecommunications – Bell Atlantic, GTE, Ameritech, SBC Communications, Pacific Telesis Group • Financial Institutions – Citibank, Zion’s Bank, Chase Manhattan, Nations Bank, Banc One, Crestar Financial Corp, Barclays Bank • Utilities – Boston Edison, PG&E, Questar, Edison International • Billing Service Providers – CSG For a complete set of companies that