the banking industry is trying to work with have antiquated Legacy systems that make it difficult and costly to perform a true, end-to-end, B2B transaction. This also holds true in the consumer industry. Many customers write monthly checks to older, not so high tech companies such as cable, utilities, and smaller lending companies. These companies do not have electronic bill acceptance in place. Therefore, when you set up electronic bill payment with your bank, the bank is essentially writing a check for you and mailing it out at their expense. As you can see, the banking industry is making an attempt to go electronic but not all companies are set up to accept an electronic bill payment.There are several attributes that the Internet banking and electronic bill payment systems must have in order to be successful. First, they must be efficient and reliable. Since making payments to creditors on time is essential, the site must be up and working efficiently. The bank and the customer can not afford to have the site down for several hours and have payments delayed. The payments and account balances must be instantaneous for the on-line banking site to be efficient. Second, authentication is a requirement. Your bank account is private and can be viewed only by you and your bank. Your Internet banking account must also be private. Moreover, safeguards and Internet security protocols must be in place to deter fraud. Since anybody can access the Internet at home and visit a bank website, user id's and passwords must be encrypted to ensure that the only person able to access an account is the owner of that account. Third, the information has to be traceable. Both the customer and creditor must be able to tell when the payment was made, to whom, from whom, and the exact amount of the transaction. The information also has to be reversible. Since overpayments and mistakes do occur, proper crediting of an account must be an optiona...
