There is a direct benefit to having a customer's eyes on your Web site for a definite amount of time each month, and savvy organizations are turning that time into money. The Killen report predicts that the proportion of bills being presented electronically by businesses in the United States will reach 8 percent in 2000 and increase to 34 percent by 2005. This method of billing may still be relatively rare, but it is clearly growing more popular.
Customers also reap numerous benefits from electronic bill payment.
For consumers who have Internet access, a well-designed EBPP site can provide a convenient way to pay recurring bills from the familiar interface of a Web browser, using checks, credit cards or electronic funds transfer. A good EBPP system can offer additional customer services, such as access to account history and detailed billing information. Both Netscape and Novazen have targeted their products at specific vertical markets. These types of businesses will derive the most obvious and immediate benefits from EBPP systems, and they have tended to be the earliest adopters of online bill payment systems. As for Netscape BillerXpert, we tested it on a Sun Microsystems Ultra10 with 256 MB of RAM running Solaris 2.6.