Atos Origin Sweden Expands Its CheckFree-Based Electronic Billing Service Across Europe

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 Swedens 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. 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 Europes 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 Although initially 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 volume of 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 Europes fast-growing e-billing market for Internet banks. Its flagship financial services customer is one of Swedens largest banks with 6.5 million customers -- over a third of which are online banking users. In addition to handling the banks print-based invoices, Atos has been hosting the banks electronic billing and payment service for the past 18 months. Central to this back-end service is CheckFrees powerful i-Series BSP server, which is also connected to Swedens 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.