SEEING over 80 per cent cost savings in print materials and postage would be a good enough incentive to move financial institutions as well as telecommunications and utility companies to adopt Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP).

Just imagine, if a mobile telecommunications provider has one million subscribers, and the cost of sending their bills and statements is RM2.50 per consumer on average, the cost of sending these bills and statements itself would be RM2.5 million, which is a substantial amount.

But with EBPP, these bills and statements can be sent via e-mail for a minimum of 30 sen, claims NetInfinium Corporation Sdn Bhd's chief executive officer Edwin Tay.

“By proactively pushing the e-statements to clients, financial institutions and telcos can build on their loyalty and differentiate themselves from competitors with the services they render,” he says.
A leading local bank, for example, allows its customers to pay not only their bills online, but other utility bills as well. In the third generation of online bill payment services, customers will also get to see the details of all their bills and get a choice to pay only a certain percentage of the total amount, Tay says.

NetInfinium is an information technology marketing and communication solutions and services provider which has developed Direct Secure, a payment enabler system that allows sensitive documents to be sent securely via e-mail.

“We've designed our system to have an automated compression engine which will automatically compress all e-mail to half their size so as not to slow down or even crash the recipient's PC,” Tay says.
Another advantage of Direct Secure lies in its digital format, which enables the recipient to print out and archive his statements for future reference.

However, as the solution functions as a payment enabler, it will not display all bill details, Tay says.
According to Tay, NetInfinium will start marketing Direct Secure aggressively next year and that some financial institutions and telecommunications companies are already showing interest to adopt EBPP.
He also said the rise in Internet usage will drive the growth of the EBPP industry. With the significant growth in Internet access, more people are expected to pay their bills online in the coming years, especially through wireless applications such as mobile phones and laptops. By 2010, it is reported more than 50 per cent of the bills are expected to be paid electronically from the present 10 per cent estimate.

Direct Secure is developed in-house by NetInfinium, funded through the Multimedia Grant Scheme awarded last August.