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Banking on Java-based billing

Standards-based open-systems protocol raises groundswell of industry and consumer interest

By Tom Clements, JavaWorld.com, 11/01/99

With the federally mandated Y2K moratorium on new software development for banks and financial service companies only a month away, Wells Fargo is getting in just under the gun with some eye-popping new software for online bill presentment and payment. Partnering with the appropriately named Just in Time Solutions of San Francisco, Wells Fargo hopes to yank Web-based banking out of the read-only doldrums and turn the activity into an interactive -- and standards-based -- personalized financial event.

To hasten the transformation of bank customers from passive account viewers to active bill payers, Wells Fargo has licensed Just in Time's BillCast 2.0 platform. This robust and elegantly architected suite of modules enables ecommerce organizations large and small -- banks, biller service providers (BSPs), consolidators, and Internet portals -- to develop applications that personalize Web-page billing information for their customers.

Billers can either publish bills locally (directly on the biller's Web site) or push bill summaries out to larger ecommerce entities for payment consolidation. Wells Fargo is taking the former course: it plans to use the BillCast software to drive internal Web sites for its own customers. But the BillCast platform is flexible enough and modular enough to support the activities of companies choosing to go in both directions at once.

BillCast platform

The core BillCast platform consists of two main servers: a frontend presentation server that enables dynamic bill presentment to customers who want to access and analyze their bills, and a backend integration server that retrieves the customer account and billing information for the presentation server by accessing databases and legacy systems. Rounding out the platform are an email notification server to provide integrated customer care, a server for specialized HTML rendering, and a business rules server to enable personalized Web-page presentment to selected customers. Just in Time hopes that all this provides integrated customer care, personalized service, and dynamic content in a flexible, standards-based environment.

Plugged in to this core framework are several special-purpose modules: one to actually pay bills (the Payment Module), another to transfer the bill data through a nonproprietary network of open-systems billers and consolidators (the Distribution Module), and a third to support backend hookups to recalcitrant legacy information systems (the Data Translation Module). Altogether, they make up a well-integrated billing and payments package with an emphasis on individualized financial care. But, with only 5 percent of banking customers currently enrolled in online banking -- according to the latest figures from Goldman, Sachs & Co. -- you may be wondering, what's the big deal? Why all the shouting?

Back to the future

To answer that question, you have to go back to when the banking industry first discovered the economic benefits of having a loyal -- and to some degree captive -- customer base. In the mid-1970s, two California banks, Security Pacific (now sadly defunct) and Wells Fargo, pioneered the concept of relationship banking. The idea was fairly simple: You've got a core constituency of loyal customers regularly depositing funds at your location. Why not leverage that passbook goodwill and encourage their interest in a whole new slew of banking products -- monetary instruments like certificates of deposit, credit card accounts, home loans, boat loans, real estate investment trusts, safety deposit boxes, offshore oil leases, you name it -- and then cross-sell like hell?

 

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