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July 2000
Presenting Bills & Statements Online
By Mason Grigsby
Have you ever tried to get a copy of your bank, brokerage or credit card statement? Or has your company tried to get a copy of a bill or credit memo from your supplier? In the past this rarely happened quickly, but now that’s all changing thanks to electronic document presentment.
Competition is the driving force behind electronic statement presentment. By delivering outbound bills, statements and other computer-generated documents via the Web, companies are improving customer service and unlocking incremental sales with one-to-one marketing messages. Two major trends have developed in online document presentment.
Business-to-Consumer Presentment: Brokerage firms are delivering customer statements, confirmation notices and year-end dividend notices on the Internet. Banks are presenting account and 1099 interest statements. Insurance companies are posting policies and bills.
Business-to-Business Presentment: Companies are providing vendors and partners 24/7 access to statements such as invoices, credit memos and purchase orders.
ADP Web-Enables Brokerage Consider Automatic Data Processing’s Investor
Services Division, which annually prints more than 980 million pages of customer
statements, stock confirmations and 1099 interest and dividend notices using
its IBM/MVS legacy mainframes. ADP recently contracted with the docHarbor division
of Anacomp (www.anacomp.com) to put these documents
online. DocHarbor is an application service provider that delivers Anacomp’s
Enterprise Report Management software online.
“We are seeing a strong demand for electronic delivery of confirms, statements, and other customer-related documents,” says Bob Barsky, a senior vice president at ADP. “We needed a solution that could be implemented quickly and that could be easily integrated with our workflow and report mining capability to round out our customer relationship management solution.”
In setting requirements for its presentment solution, ADP demanded:
• a long-term (seven-year) repository meeting Securities and Exchange Commission regulations and customer demands for access to historical documents;
• preservation of the original document format in the document repository to ensure a uniform document history; • delivery in HTML format so that no plug-ins or other special browser software would be required by customers; • browser presentation of a “nearly exact replica” of the original printed documents to avoid the potential confusion that two different statement formats might create.
ADP faced a minor technological hurdle in that all these customer documents were created using IBM Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) print output format, which is not suitable for direct Web presentation. Fortunately, Anacomp’s enterprise report management software keeps the AFP print stream intact for archival purposes while transforming the documents to HTML on demand for Web viewing. This instant transformation process required no programming, and it enabled docHarbor to implement much of its solution within 30 days. (Anacomp is by no means alone in converting AFP to HTML or other Web-presentable formats. See “16 Presentment & Payment Options,” page 24, for details on other vendors offering this functionality.)
ADP’s solution incorporates a document warehouse that automatically creates a metadata index of each document by client (ADP has more than 100 individual brokerage firms), document type and account number. The document metadata supports integration with ADP’s Internet server client ID and account number password security and firewall software.
The system notifies customers by email when their documents are available for viewing. A click of a mouse allows customers, client brokers and customer service representatives to access individual statements on the ADP document server. The software transforms the relevant pages to HTML on the fly.
Avoid Presentation Pitfalls
There are many ways to handle all-points-addressable documents — that is, documents that can be delivered via print, thick clients, email, intranets or the Internet. But be aware that you don’t have to build highly customized and expensive solutions from scratch.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. A major New York-based financial institution recently discovered it had wasted time and money developing a customized way to convert AFP format documents to HTML. The company spent about $100,000 and eight months with an outside software development company to create an Internet HTML statement. The vendor was extracting customer data from the AFP print stream, exporting data fields to a Microsoft SQL relational database and then creating a new HTML statement. A wonderful plan — except that it was unnecessary. The bank “didn’t know what they didn’t know.”
As in the ADP example, many presentment vendors simply convert existing print streams — whether AFP, Xerox DJDE/Metacode or simple ASCII — to the desired Web delivery format. This is fast, and it eliminates programming. Bills, statements, credit memos, reports, etc. can be transformed and delivered over the Web within days.
Research output options before you buy. Presentment software should transform print output to any desired Web-compatible format, be it HTML, DHTML, PDF or a bit-map format such as GIF, PNG or JPEG. Determine what you’ll need before spending a lot of money and time on software development.
A leading mutual fund giant recently faced a top management directive to get customer statements on the Internet. They quickly found a presentment vendor that could transform their AFP documents into HTML, but they didn’t bother to redesign their landscape-format document for more practical presentation online. As a result, customers have to scroll from side to side to see all the information on their statements.
Choose the right delivery format. A legacy bill warehouse stores documents in their native print output format. These files are transformed instantaneously for online presentment to customers, business partners, accounting personnel and customer service representatives.
Note that some vendors can transform the entire AFP or Metacode print stream into XML for storage in the warehouse. According to these vendors, this will position your company for next-generation solutions that harness the power of XML. For now, they convert XML to HTML for delivery through current-generation browsers.
HTML and the bit-map format alternatives (GIF, JPEG, PNG) are preferred by many organizations, because they are supported by standard Internet browsers and do not require any special plug-ins or downloads on the part of the customer. Plug-ins are somewhat controversial — there’s a debate whether end users are willing or capable of putting these into action.
While there are plug-ins that will let you view AFP and Metacode print files online, some organizations would rather spend more upfront on transformation technologies than face ongoing customer service support issues tied to plug-ins and downloads.
Using plug-ins may be fine for the in-house intranet, which can be controlled by the organization, but making this a condition for presenting documents to the general customer population is another matter. Any problem displaying the bill or statement (even something simple such as slow loading of the viewing software) can trigger a call to the customer service center.
Look at the numbers: A 1 percent increase in customer calls to a brokerage firm with 2 million customers would trigger 20,000 additional incoming calls per month.
Once an Option, Now a Need
Bill and statement presentation is rapidly becoming a strategic and competitive
necessity, not an option. It therefore makes sense to do it the easiest way.
A little investigation into presentment choices can greatly reduce your investment
of time and money. Web access to customer data does not need to be a major development
effort.
Td Waterhouse Posts 1099s In Time For Tax Season
Late last year, brokerage firm TD Waterhouse made Web access to statements and 1099 dividend and interest notices a high priority. They wanted the online statements to look the same as the printed documents. They also wanted to present through ordinary browsers without any plug-ins or downloads.
The technical team at TD Waterhouse initially considered a process that would extract the relevant field data from the AFP print file and move it to a SQL Server database. HTML output created on the fly from the SQL database would closely replicate the existing statement and 1099 print formats, but this would also create two processes and statement warehouses — one for print and one for the Internet.
Then another option surfaced. Enterprise report management vendor Microbank
(www.microbank.com) proposed transforming the
existing AFP files to HTML. Waterhouse asked Microbank to finish the project
by December 1999, in time for the tax season.
During November, Microbank’s technical team successfully implemented the process of transforming the existing statement and 1099 output to HTML. The process involved using the AFP-formatted ASCII print spool file to create XML. Working from the XML, standard HTML pages were created for presentment. The entire process was accomplished as records were requested online.
“The Microbank transformation process met our most immediate challenge,”
says Jim Brennan, first vice president, information services, at Waterhouse.
“The transformation/presentation process required no significant programming
other than formatting the new HTML page, and the statements and 1099s were available
on schedule. Because the AFP files are stored in the warehouse in standard print
file format, our clients will be able to use the Microbank software to mine
their statements on the Web and create their own trade statistics.
Northeast Utilities Presents Graphical Statements
In the wake of deregulation, electronic bill presentment is helping many utilities become more customer centric. Take Northeast Utilities (NU). “We solve two service issues with bill presentment,” says Kevin Charette, NU’s director of customer services. “Service reps no longer have to access multiple legacy systems to get all of the billing data for a given customer. The exact replica of the entire bill will now be viewed on a browser. Our customers can now retrieve and view bills through our extranet, eliminating the need and the associated costs to print and mail paper bills.”
The Northeast Utilities presentation process involves storing the original
AFP print file with the associated customer account number and customer name
metadata index in a Viewdirect document warehouse from Mobius Software (www.mobius.com).
Bill summary data (the first page) is sent to customers via email, while the
bill detail is available at the Northeast Utilities Web site. When the bill
is accessed, the original AFP print files are transformed into a PNG, GIF or
JPEG bit-map format for viewing by customers and NU employees through ordinary
browsers. When the bill detail is retrieved, the Mobius software detects which
browser type and version the customer is using and transforms the bill to a
compatible format.
The bit-map format was chosen because the bill detail contains many charts and graphs. Creating an exact replica in HTML would have required costly, time-consuming software development. The bit-map file retains the exact look of the original without requiring specialized viewing software or a plug-in.
Excluding set-up time for customer registration, security and payment features
on the NU Web site, Mobius implemented the bill transformation software in just
two days. The programming effort originally anticipated to create billing documents
in HTML was eliminated from the budget.
Mason Grigsby is a partner at Imerge Consulting.
He can be reached at mason@imergeconsult.com.
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