Atos Origin Sweden Expands Its CheckFree-Based Electronic Billing Service Across Europe
March 16 2004 - 9:00AM
PR Newswire (US)
Atos Origin Sweden Expands Its CheckFree-Based Electronic Billing
Service Across Europe ATLANTA and LONDON, March 16 /PRNewswire/ --
CheckFree i-Solutions, a subsidiary of CheckFree Corporation
(Nasdaq: CKFR), today announced that the Sweden-based biller
service provider (BSP), Atos Origin Sweden AB (formerly
SchlumbergerSema), has further expanded its European electronic
billing services offering. Supported by the market-leading
CheckFree i-Series platform, Atos Origin Sweden now provides
electronic billing services to one of the largest pan-European
telecommunications operators and one of Sweden's major banks, with
expertise in both business and consumer markets. When Atos decided
to add electronic billing to its traditional print and mail
services early in 2002, the company looked at several leading
systems integrators as well as the two leading software products on
the market. CheckFree and its technology partner, Emitto Nordic,
weighed in with several major advantages. "We chose Emitto Nordic
as our systems integrator because they offered the best service,
and CheckFree i-Solutions was another obvious choice with the
leading electronic billing software product in the world," said
Roger Wrede, Head of e-Billing Business/Output Services at Atos
Origin Sweden. "We believed CheckFree's experience working with
leading billers and its history of solid successes would be a major
advantage when dealing with the complexities of developing our
billing service provider solution for major billing clients across
Europe. The i-Series software platform was sophisticated yet
flexible, easy to work with, and it easily integrated into our
existing archiving systems." Rolling out across Europe Atos began
implementation of the CheckFree i-Series biller service provider
e-billing system in March 2002. Two months later it went live with
its first customer, a Swedish bank. By June, the service was being
rolled out to a select customer base of Atos' second major biller,
one of Europe's leading alternative fixed and mobile
telecommunications companies. Atos' e-billing service was soon
extended across Europe, starting with telecommunication clients in
Germany. Now customers in Austria, Spain and Italy are also
receiving electronic bills, with a French service currently under
development. Altogether, the Atos e-billing service will soon be
available to almost 10 million business-to-business (B2B) and
business-to- consumer (B2C) telecommunication customers across five
countries, which is half of its total customer base. The entire
Atos electronic billing infrastructure is run from a single central
data centre based in Sweden. Value-added services for business
Althoughinitially focused on B2C subscribers, Atos' electronic
billing service has become increasingly focused on the
telecommunications B2B market, enabled by the comprehensive suite
of CheckFree i-Series business support tools. For
telecommunications end-users, these value-added services include
corporate hierarchy mapping and split-billing, rapidly customisable
invoice summary layouts, flexible data access and accounts payable
workflow tools. Atos will expand its business-enabled e-billing,
not just in the telecommunication industry but across a range of
industries from financial services and manufacturing to
distribution and retail. Other billers signing up to the Atos
service include a large manufacturing company that issues a high
volumeof invoices to retailers globally. Each of these invoices can
contain thousands of line items relating to component purchases,
making electronic billing and its bundled services highly
attractive to B2B customers. Electronic Billing and Payment for
online banks Atos is also staking a claim in Europe's fast-growing
e-billing market for Internet banks. Its flagship financial
services customer is one of Sweden's largest banks with 6.5 million
customers -- over a third of which areonline banking users. In
addition to handling the bank's print-based invoices, Atos has been
hosting the bank's electronic billing and payment service for the
past 18 months. Central to this back-end service is CheckFree's
powerful i-Series BSP server, which is also connected to Sweden's
other major Internet banks. This arrangement gives customers the
freedom to pay their major credit cards and a range of other bills
from any e-bank portal in the country. Archiving goes electronic
Another popular offering is Atos' invoice retrieval service,
powered by a real-time archiving solution. Traditionally this
service has been available for printed invoices only, but with
CheckFree i-Series' ability to integrate with legacy archive data,
Atos can now harness its e-billing repository to provide a
paperless solution that is both speedy and cost efficient. "In just
under two years, Atos Origin Sweden has developed a very
sophisticated pan-European e-billing service withstrong growth
potential. Its pioneering Web-based services for banks in Sweden
are another example of how the application of e-Billing and
e-Statement technology for online banks can improve the customer
experience," said Steve Wright, Director, Global Marketing for
CheckFree i-Solutions. "CheckFree is proud to see that the i-Series
technology is being applied so successfully within such a wide
range of applications and looks forward to supporting Atos'
far-reaching expansion plans into new markets." About Atos Origin (
www.atosorigin.com ) Atos Origin is an international information
technology (IT) services company. Its business is turning client
vision into results through the application of consulting, systems
integration and managed operations. The company's annual revenues
are more than EUR 5 billion and it employs 50,000 people in 50
countries. Atos Origin's client list includes ABN AMRO, Akzo Nobel,
Alstom, BNP Paribas, BP, Ericsson, EDF, Euronext, Fiat, France
Telecom, ICI, ING, KPN, Lucent, Philips, Renault, Royal Bank of
Scotland, Saudi Aramco, Schlumberger, Shell, Telecom Italia, UBS,
Unilever, Vivendi Universal and Vodafone. Atos Origin is quoted on
the Paris Euronext Premier Marche and trades as Atos Origin,
AtosEuronext, Atos Worldline, Atos KPMG Consulting and Atos
Odyssee. About CheckFree ( www.checkfreecorp.com ) CheckFree
(Nasdaq: CKFR) is the leading provider of financial electronic
commerce services and products. Founded in 1981 and celebrating its
23rd year in e-commerce, CheckFree is comprised of three divisions:
Electronic Commerce, Software, and Investment Services. CheckFree
launched the first fully integrated electronic billing and payment
solution in 1997.In the quarter ended December 31, 2003, more than
12 million consumers initiated online payments through services
offered by CheckFree's Electronic Commerce division. Electronic
billing and payment is available through more than a thousand
financial services organisations, including banks, brokerage firms,
Internet portals and personal financial management (PFM) software.
At these sites, consumers are able to electronically receive and
pay essentially all the bills most common to a U.S. household.
CheckFree delivers 18.5 million e-bills each quarter. CheckFree
Investment Services provides a broad range of investment management
services to thousands of financial institutions nationwide. The
division's clients manage more than 1.4 million portfolios totaling
more than US$700 billion in assets. CheckFree's Software division
provides solutions through three operating units: CheckFree ACH
Solutions, CheckFree Financial and Compliance Solutions (CFACS),
and CheckFree i-Solutions. CheckFreeACH Solutions provides software
and services that are used to process more than two-thirds of the
nation's nine billion Automated Clearing House payments, while
CFACS provides reconciliation, financial messaging, workflow and
compliance software and services to more than 600 organisations in
the banking, brokerage, investment management, insurance and credit
card industries, among others. CheckFree i-Solutions is the leading
provider of e-billing and e-statement software and services for
bothbusiness-to-consumer and business-to-business applications.
Certain of CheckFree's statements in this press release are not
purely historical, and as such are "forward-looking statements"
within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
of 1995. These include statements regarding management's
intentions, plans, beliefs, expectations or projections of the
future. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties,
including without limitation, the various risks inherent in
CheckFree's business, and other risks and uncertainties detailed
from time to time in CheckFree's periodic reports filed with the
Securities and Exchange Commission, including CheckFree's Annual
Report on Form 10-K for the year ended June30, 2003 (filed
September 15, 2003), and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the
quarter ended September 30, 2003 (filed November 13, 2003) and Form
10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2003 (filed February 12,
2004). One or more of these factors have affected, and could in the
future affect CheckFree's business and financial results in future
periods, and could cause actual results to differ materially from
plans and projections. There can be no assurance that the
forward-looking statements made in this press release will prove to
be accurate, and issuance of such forward-looking statements should
not be regarded as a representation by CheckFree, or any other
person, that the objectives and plans of CheckFree will be
achieved. All forward- looking statements made in this press
release are based on information presently available to management,
and CheckFree assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking
statements. DATASOURCE: CheckFree Corporation CONTACT: Media, Judy
DeRango Wicks, +1-678-375-1595, or jdwicks@checkfree.com, or
Investor relations, Tina Moore, +1-678-375-1278, or
tmoore@checkfree.com, both of CheckFree Corporation, Media contact
for CheckFree in the UK: Elaine Graham, +44 (0)1570 470706,
egcomms@aol.com, FCMN Contact: aatemples@checkfree.com, Company
News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/821650.html, Web site:
http://www.checkfreecorp.com, http://www.atosorigin.com, (CKFR)
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