It may be more than you wanted to know, but here's a recent IFX/OFX news
piece:
--------------------
"Bill Presentment In Standards Scuffle
By Kimberly Weisul , Inter@ctive Week
Proposed changes in the capabilities of a bill presentment standard are
ruffling feathers in the billing and banking industries. Critics said the
old recommendations unfairly favor consumer service providers such as
CheckFree, Intuit and TransPoint, while the new ones could force them to
give up access to valuable demographic information and rethink their
business models.
The flap centers on Internet Financial Exchange, a proposed standard that
could be used to shuttle bills electronically between billers, consumers,
payment processors and aggregator sites, such as banks or portals. IFX
represents the merger of two standards, Gold and the Open Financial
Exchange. Gold, backed by Integrion, a consortium of 15 banks and IBM, was
designed to handle back-office functions. CheckFree, Intuit and Microsoft
backed OFX, which handled front-end tasks.
The business practices document for IFX, first produced by the National
Association of Clearinghouse Administrators' Council for Electronic Billing
and Payment, required that customers sign up with a consumer service
provider in order to receive bills online. Billers couldn't directly enroll
their own customers, a "glaring deficiency," according to Richard Crone,
vice president and general manager at electronic check vendor CyberCash.
"Everyone wants to enroll the consumer, accumulate the marketing information
and gain the resulting power position," he said.
The decision not to include enrollment directly with the biller in the first
document was a contentious one, said John Kwant, head of digital document
delivery solutions at vendor Pitney Bowes. In the first go-round, "it was
one of the issues that was tabled. We agreed to disagree," he said. In the
second draft, billers will likely be included, due to a protest Crone
described as an uproar.
CheckFree Vice President Ken Hobday attributed the proposed change simply to
"biller demand."
Requiring customers to enroll with a service provider, rather than with a
biller, guaranteed service providers a seat at the table in the early rounds
of bill presentment; in addition, it gave service providers an opportunity
to assemble an impressive customer database. While few billers have the
capability to forgo service providers altogether, changes in the business
practices document, which will affect the development of the new standard,
would make it easier. All of the bill presentment programs currently in use
make consumers go to the billers' Web sites to pay their bills.
CheckFree (www.checkfree.com) supports IFX as it is currently proposed --
without direct customer enrollment through the biller. Bill Burnham, an
analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston, said that by doing so, CheckFree is
trying to keep a monopoly on bill payment. Only CheckFree has Internet bill
presentment clients in production.
-----------------
Craig Wilson
TranSettlements, Inc.
www.transettlements.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Whitehead [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2000 3:24 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: EDI and OFX or IFX
Dave,
OFX (Open Financial Exchange),is basically a specification for the
electronic
trading of financial information to and from financial institutions. you can
go
to this web site for some info http://www.ofx.net/ofx/default.asp
Sorry, not to sure about IFX
Anthony Whitehead
Tehcnology Enablement
Andersen Consulting
=->Can someone please tell me or point where to find info on
=->(1) What OFX and IFX is (2) How it relates to EDI. Thanks. DKF
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