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IBPP Strategies and Trends |
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Screen
Scraping: The Monster IBPP Wave You Absolutely Must Catch- How Screen
Scraper-Enabled Content Aggregation is Suddenly Reshaping IBPP Richard
K. Crone Screen
scraping is poised to effect a sea change in Internet billing overturning
some of its most cherished notions and greatly accelerating its acceptance
among consumers. Here is how billers and their banks can position
themselves to best profit from the rising tide of screen scraper-enabled,
consumer-directed IBPP. Like
the ocean, the Internet is constantly changing, its face perpetually swept
by successive waves of new technologies and evolving business models. One
recent “monster wave” called screen scraping, is rapidly transforming
the way financially savvy consumers navigate the Web. This is important to
billers and banks because screen scraping is placing consumers firmly at
the navigational helm and 1.
turning many of the accepted notions about Internet Bill Presentment and
Payment (IBPP) completely upside down and 2.
making it imperative that billers and their banks move quickly to take
advantage of the screen scraping tide and avoid being swamped. Enabling...
and positively disruptive What
is screen scraping all about and what does it have to do with IBPP? Screen
scraping is both an enabling and a disruptive technology. It is enabling
in that it allows consumers to easily consolidate, or aggregate, Internet
content. Screen scraping lets a consumer go to a single “content
aggregation site” and define exactly what content gets aggregated, how
and when it gets aggregated, and in what order and on what screen or frame
that content is presented. An individual’s customized content might
include pertinent news, targeted shopping offers, updated personal
financial data, e-mail, or all of the above. The screen scraper goes out
to the sites defined by the consumer, literally “scrapes up” the
required information, and then brings it back to the primary site for
individualized consolidation and presentation. The process is analogous to
obtaining music tracks from various artists and burning them onto your own
personalized CD something that can now be done at numerous sites on the
Internet. Catching
the wave Several
attention-getting Internet businesses have already staked out strong
positions as content aggregators in the personal account arena. For
example, Yodlee (yodlee.com), 1View Network (1viewnetwork. com), and
VerticalOne (verticalone.com) let consumers enter a single password to go
to a personalized and secure page in order to check any number of bank
balances, credit card statements, brokerage accounts, and bills, all
scraped from disparate sites. While at their personal page, consumers can
also read their e-mail, scan personalized news, confirm travel
reservations, count their frequent flyer miles, and more. How
significant is the screen scraper-driven content aggregation wave? Many
key Internet players think it is highly significant. Yodlee, for example,
offers consolidated access to more than 800 leading sites, organized into
17 categories including auctions, banks, credit cards, and bills. S1
Corporation, an Internet banking pioneer, meanwhile, purchased still
nascent VerticalOne in November 1999 in a transaction valued at more than
$160 million. Time
for billers and banks to play Billers
and their banks (and, for that matter, banks as billers with their
millions of monthly account and credit card statements) can ride the
financial content aggregation wave as well; in fact, they must ride it or
face being left behind. But to do so, billers first have to be ready at
their own Web sites. Here
is where screen scraping becomes a disruptive technology, but in a
positive sense. Screen scraping actually delivers the key promise of IBPP
bills can finally be presented when and how the consumer wants them. There
are multiple approaches to IBPP, many of which depend on
yet-to-be-settled-upon interface standards, which helps explain why IBPP
has been slow to take off. With so many IBPP models, ranging from biller-direct
to thick and thin concentration, consumers and billers alike are confused.
Yet many pundits agree that IBPP will ramp up sharply when bills can be
aggregated and delivered wherever and however the consumer dictates. And
this is exactly what screen scraping enables not tomorrow, but right now. Billers
and consumers empowered... and the world turned upside down A
lot of different types of organizations have attempted to be the online
aggregation point for consumer bill obligations, including financial
software sites, bill payment processors, and bank consortiums. Screen
scrapers turn all of these organizations and their respective business
models and IBPP implementation approaches upside down. Suddenly,
primary content holders namely, billers and banks with account statements
and balances that have made their information available online at their
own Web sites can fully participate in a consumer aggregation service that
is completely driven and defined by the consumer and not some third party.
This means that billers can participate:
This
is powerful stuff. Screen scraper-enabled content aggregation doesn’t
require coordination with third parties and doesn’t depend on standards.
All that is required is that a biller be able to register consumers to
view and pay their bills directly at the biller’s site, and that
permission be granted to a content aggregator to securely “scrape” and
present billing information on the consumer’s behalf. This
completely sucks the wind from the traditional IBPP concentrator’s
sails. Thick and thin payment concentrators could once argue that a biller
needed to send them their bills because the concentrator alone had
“access to the broadest base of consumers” and could “provide a
single, simple, and convenient point of entry.” Now, thanks to screen
scraping technology, the ball, and all the power, is back in the
biller’s court. Why
you must move now Screen
scraping is going to move ahead, with or without billers and banks. In his
book The Innovator’s
Dilemma, Clayton Christensen differentiates between sustaining
technologies and disruptive technologies. According to Christensen,
sustaining technologies are those that improve the performance of
established products “along the dimensions of performance that
mainstream customers in major markets have historically valued.”
Disruptive technologies, on the other hand, periodically emerge to
precipitate the failure of leading firms in a given market. Examples of
disruptive technologies given in the book include transistors over vacuum
tubes and small off-road motorcycles from companies such as Honda and
Yamaha that eventually pushed monster cycles from BMW and Harley-Davidson
out of the mainstream. Screen
scraping is similarly disruptive for all current bill concentration and
bill delivery services. The only difference is that “eventually”
isn’t measured in years. The disruption of settled IBPP notions and
implementations precipitated by screen scraping technology is moving at
Internet speed and will be effected in a matter of months. Given the
available alternatives, screen scraper-driven IBPP has the most appealing
interface with the greatest consumer benefits for the least cost, and with
the easiest implementation for everyone involved. There is really no time
to lose in getting on top of this wave. Strategies
for profiting from screen scraping While
screen scraping spells trouble for payment concentrators, it spells
nothing but good news for billers and their banks. To fully profit from
screen scraping, a biller only needs to: 1.
Implement IBPP at its own site. 2.
Enroll its customers for IBPP and register them for payment. 3.
Exercise its content rights to get a piece of the action (resulting from
content aggregators’ presentation of the biller’s content). IBPP
at the biller’s own Web site is the primary prerequisite and is a fairly
straightforward task. A biller’s bank needs to cooperate and it behooves
a bank to do so in order to protect and further its relationship with the
biller. When a bill presentation screen is scraped and presented to a
consumer, it then becomes an easy matter for the consumer to single-click
to the biller’s own site for payment. Once there, nothing stands in the
way of the biller engaging the consumer in a value-added electronic
dialog, with both the consumer and the biller enjoying all the benefits
that can be derived from one-to-one marketing. The
second prerequisite is just as important. It is imperative that billers
always sign up their own customers and register them for payment. This is
a step that should never be delegated to a third party, even to a content
aggregator. It is this registration that enables a biller to embed
electronic payment on the electronically presented bill, regardless of
where it is viewed. As a result, payment always comes back to the biller
and its bank via the shortest and most cost-effective path (and thus
yields the greatest cash management benefits). Even more importantly, it
protects the relationship between the biller and its consumers, a
relationship that thrives on minimal intermediation. Finally, enrollment
time is when a biller can best collect the valuable marketing information
and secure the share-of-mind that will help it forge tighter customer
bonds. Once
a consumer is registered by the biller to engage in IBPP, the consumer can
use the content aggregator of his choice to screen scrape on his behalf. A
good analogy is an ATM. Consumers enroll with their banks for ATM cards
and for access to their accounts via ATMs. They can go to their own
bank’s ATMs, or to any other bank’s ATMs, or to even the supermarket
checkout counter to withdraw from their registered accounts as long as
these electronic “points-of-presence” are on the same network.
Regardless of where the transaction is initiated, the funds ultimately
come from the registered account. Hence, consumer-driven screen scraping
is analogous to the consumer using a foreign ATM, while viewing and
payment are analogous to the transaction going back to the registered
account residing at the original account holding bank. Taking
a piece of the action Billers
also need to think about exercising their content rights when granting
permission to content aggregators to scrape their sites. A bill is a
valuable commodity. Billers can use this content as leverage to:
There
are some issues revolving around whether screen scrapers can legally
obtain password-protected access to consumer billing data. If, when the
issues are sorted out, it appears that the billers own the data, then a
biller can exercise copyright and distribution rights with the screen
scraping content aggregators, just as TIME, ABC and other media companies
have. If it turns out that consumers own the content, then billers will
have to “content” themselves with “merely” having an inexpensive
and immediate IBPP channel. Even
more intriguing than fees from a revenue generation standpoint, a biller
(or a bank with multiple major billers as its customers) can license
screen scraping technology to set itself up as a content aggregator and
thus a valued destination point for Internet traffic. What’s more, a
biller has the inside track when it comes to promoting its own independent
aggregation service what could be a more economical or direct tool for
piquing customer interest and driving consumer adoption of IBPP than the
current paper bill and envelope? Bankers
need to jump on board, too The
retail side of banking, with its checking account and credit card
statements, is in an obvious position to benefit from screen
scraper-driven IBPP in much the same way as a utility, telco, or other
major biller and should be moving just as fast to do so. The commercial
side of banking, with tens of thousands of major billers to serve, should
also be embracing the trend in support of their large cash management
customers. Rather
than waiting for payment concentrator models to mature and standards to
gel, bankers can protect their payment franchise and leverage their
relationships with major billers right now by supporting billers in
enrolling their consumers for IBPP and registering them for payment. There
is no need to collaborate with competing banks or potentially competitive
non-banks. As screen scraping gains momentum, for a bank not to act is to
do its commercial customers an extreme disservice. If
it walks like a duck, and quacks... Screen
scraping is not the be-all and end-all of IBPP. Other technologies will
undoubtedly come along to augment it and older IBPP models, such a thick
and thin concentration, will still have a place, although much diminished.
Yet screen scraping has all the earmarks of the killer technology that
will finally transform IBPP into a mainstream bill-paying medium.
As
the saying goes, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it
probably is a duck. Screen scraping delivers everything billers and banks
interested in IBPP have been looking for. All it takes to get started is
an IBPP capability at a biller’s own Web site-a model proven to provide
not just the best hard-dollar IBPP ROI, but also the best returns from the
marketing, customer care, and cash management perspectives as well. In
summary, screen scraping is not just a wave that should be caught; it is a
wave that must be caught if a biller and its bank ever hope to profit from
IBPP.
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