Friday, October 19, 2007

Outlook 2007 a challenge for e-marketers

Electronic messaging specialist Striata is advising digital marketers to increase planning and testing of e-mail marketing campaigns, following the release of Outlook 2007. According to Mia Papanicolaou, head of e-marketing at Striata, the enhancements included in the new Outlook version do have an impact on e-mail marketing campaigns.

Papanicolaou stresses that marketers should be aware of the new requirements for successfully displaying their communications in Outlook 2007. She indicates as an example, that Outlook 2007 does not display forms such as surveys in the same way as previous versions, and that animated gifs (used for creative effect) will appear as static images.

"What appears in a customer's Outlook 2007 inbox could be different to what the marketer intended if not tested correctly, and therefore the anticipated response or participation levels may be skewed. The end result is that the e-mail campaign does not reach its targeted conversion levels."

Striata recommends conducting extensive testing of e-mails through Outlook 2007, using various coding practices in order to gain a fuller perspective of the impact the new software version has on e-mail presentation.

"Because digital marketing is such a dynamic environment, this kind of testing will be an ongoing exercise for marketers and their service providers," says Papanicolaou. "As an e-marketing agency, it is our responsibility to monitor the effects of new software versions and to manage the possible adverse impacts on the effectiveness of the campaign."

A digital marketing veteran, Papanicolaou adds that there are many tricks to control the execution of an e-mail campaign, even when the 'goalposts keep moving' at the technology level. "For example, to conduct a survey using e-mail, place a link above the form that directs Outlook 2007 users from the e-mail to an online version. You can also track this link in order to start quantifying the number of customers on your database that cannot see forms in their e-mail client."

Papanicolaou warns that as security controls get tighter, graphical images should not be used to convey the message, but rather to support the message. "Not only will new software versions introduce new challenges for e-mail marketers, but system administrators are also increasing their control over what is allowed into their employees' inbox. Embedded images are often the first to be blocked, therefore customers receiving e-mails must be able to read the message without having to see the images."



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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Why eBilling?

Why is Electronic Billing (EBPP) all the rage? Is it to cut costs, grow revenue, reduce customer churn or something more? What are the compelling reasons to consider implementing Electronic Billing?

Top 5 Reasons to Implement eBilling

Reason 1: Cost Reduction
The biggest impact that electronic bill presentment has on any organisation is that of significant, instant and measurable cost reduction. Conservative hard cost take-out ranges from 60% to over 90%. These savings are derived from paper suppression and include: printing, insertion, folding, paper, envelopes, and postage.

Additional benefits can also be attributed to soft savings such as manpower, exception handling and general business process improvements. The business case is however so compelling that it is often unnecessary to measure or include these in ROI workings.

Reason 2: Receive Payments Faster
Billing electronically allows companies to receive payments faster and with lower processing costs. For example, in the U.S., first-class mailing rates recently jumped 2 cents but that increase translates into a 2.87 cent hike for business mailers. And mailing costs represent about 70 percent of the cost of invoicing.

In the U.K., postal deliveries have been severely disrupted by a series of strikes by Royal Mail workers.

Why not invoice electronically? It's more economical, you get paid faster and you save those trees.

Reason 3: Reducing Environmental Damage
The green angle of electronic notification and billing has started to resonate with many companies, and consumers themselves who are looking for small but meaningful ways in which they can save the planet.

If all U.S. households received and paid bills electronically, the country would save 16.5 million trees yearly, reduce toxic air pollutants by 3.9 billion tons (equivalent to taking 355,015 cars off the road), and eliminate 1.6 billion pounds of solid waste, says a 2007 survey by Javelin Strategy and Research.

Reason 4: Improved Customer Relationships
Many executives see the flexibility associated with this new technology as a key to becoming more essential to their clients. The more channels of communication that can be supported, the more reliant an organisation's customers are on their relationship with them. It helps maintain client loyalty, and reduces customer churn. While print and mail will always be an important part of the way business is done,many companies are looking to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to communication with clients. Electronic billing achieves this, as well as providing an effective self-service platform, whereby clients can maintain account changes and updates without having to call into a call centre.


Reason 5: Business Growth
While most every potential user understands the implicit revenue benefit in improving customer convenience and satisfaction, many are realising that their electronic billing project assists in achieving incremental revenue goals.

EBPP can leverage the customer data contained in existing CRM systems to personalise bills with customer-specific content and targeted marketing. The more personalised the communication with the customer, the more likely the customer will stay with their biller.

Many providers have invested heavily in CRM in an attempt to learn more about their customers’ interests, desires, and habits. With that new knowledge, providers can leverage their CRM output to deliver efficient and cost-effective EBPP that’s clear, consistent, and personalised to reflect their customers’ preferences.

The bill and recurring account statements are the most frequent touch points between most companies and their customers. Bills and statements arrive month after month.
The bill and recurring account statements are how most companies communicate with their customers. A CRM solution that doesn’t include e-billing and e-statements is missing the mark.


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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Electronic invoices could save €10bn a year

From DutchNews

Dutch companies could save €10bn a year if they stopped sending invoices on paper and just used electronic mail, the entrepreneurs organisations VNO-NCW and MKB told Monday's Financieele Dagblad.

At the moment 95% of Dutch companies still send paper invoices even though it costs €30 per invoice compared with €6 for an electronic bill.

According to the two organisations, however, the existing EDI standard for electronic billing is much too expensive and they support the European Commission's plan to develop a new one.

End

Striata has previously reported the following alluring statistics about electronic billing. The focus is mainly on the US market.

  • eBilling adoption rates vary from 3 – 8% on average according to Chartwell’s 2005 report (Striata note: This is achieved after 2-3 years, using the traditional 'Pull' method of bringing consumers to a website).
  • 90% of email users send and receive email every day, and 44% are on email constantly - DoubleClick’s 6th Annual consumer Study, 2005
  • 76% of consumers would prefer to receive bills via email than having to visit a website - Bank Technology News Research (04/2002)
  • 69% of American households pay at least one bill online according to CheckFree in 2006
  • 73% of Insurance customers are prepared to pay their bills electronically - MarketSearch Corporation, 2006 - Conducted for Computer Sciences Corporation


All the evidence points to the fact that organisations are slowly understanding the benefits to be achieved with electronic billing.

Monday, October 15, 2007

E-mail Faces Deletion

What follows is an excellent article in debate style from Business Week discussing whether email is doomed to die a slow and painful death.

Will Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter unseat simple electronic mail as the No. 1 business communications tool?

Pro: The New and Improved

E-mail carries many problems that new tools don’t. For example, e-mail isn’t a good way to share knowledge. When I left NEC (NIPNF), I had 1.5 gigabytes of e-mail, including a lot of valuable information that my replacement would have loved to have access to. But when I left, my e-mail account was turned off. I don’t have access to that knowledge now. Neither does NEC. Same thing when I left Microsoft (MSFT).

What’s more, spam continues to menace e-mail accounts in a big way. I have the best anti-spam technology, but it regularly puts important messages into my spam folder, and spam still gets through.

Finally, e-mail doesn’t work with groups very well. If I send a report to my boss, co-workers can’t listen in and add value. On blogs, on the other hand, that happens all the time. (The best ideas, I’ve found, come from people who aren’t directly involved in the project.) When I was writing a book, the audience made all sorts of improvements. If we had just e-mailed directly to the publisher, we would have lost all those group-work advantages.

So, let’s look at how I use Twitter and other Web 2.0 systems like Pownce and Jaiku.

With these applications, spam barely exists. If someone starts spamming the system, he or she gets “unfollowed” and the problem is solved. And everything gets a permalink and a URL. So if I want to link to it or pass it around or get it into search engines, problem solved. You can’t link to an e-mail.

Everyone has an identity on these applications—a picture. And you can see that people are online and answering stuff and what they are doing. Twitter has an API (Application Programming Interface), so messages can be used in new ways, like the display on twittervision.com.

Another advantage: With Twitter, I can watch the streams for things that interest me. For instance, I can have all messages that include the word BusinessWeek sent to me automatically. E-mail, because its main use-case is private, could never do that.

Furthermore, anything said on Twitter stays on the Web. So your knowledge doesn’t disappear; it stays there for your replacement at your employer to study and learn from.

Does that mean e-mail is going away entirely? No. E-mail is still useful for one-to-one messages that must remain private. But e-mail will find less and less utility inside corporations.

Con: A Solid Cyber-Friend

I sometimes joke with friends from my Web 1.0 generation that I have a killer idea for a Web 2.0 application. This application will provide businesses with a communications epicenter that employees can use to send and receive any type of digital media, including text, documents, audio, and video—all for little or no cost. Always on, this application will be based on an open standard that allows all employees to connect with the members of their social network regardless of what network they belong to or what Internet-enabled device they use.

My killer Web 2.0 application is, of course, the e-mail in-box—the very place where the overwhelming majority of today’s workers begin and end their business day. Notably, e-mail is also the primary promotional medium for today’s Web 2.0 companies. Social media stalwarts such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace (NWS) rely on e-mail as their principal way to connect and gain new members. YouTube (GOOG) and Revver leverage e-mail as a viral engine to extend the reach of their video networks. Even Twitter requires an e-mail address during registration so it can send members critical account information.

Admittedly, e-mail users do have some legitimate gripes with the medium. They wrestle with e-mail etiquette. Their stress levels rise when their unread e-mail volume increases. Their blood boils when unsolicited commercial e-mails circumvent their spam filters and waste their time.

I share these frustrations, but I also realize that the solution for business is not more applications—it’s better applications. Accordingly, I firmly believe we should view e-mail and Web 2.0 technologies not as competitors but rather as evolutionary partners. Their mutual goal should be to establish a spam-free in-box in which e-mail, SMS, RSS, IM, voice, and video—even “tweets” if you like—can co-exist and increase employee productivity.

Need a buzzword for this future vision? Call it “Inbox 2.0,” if you must—a communication center that consolidates all messages in one location while tapping the collective knowledge of social networks to filter out illegitimate senders, organize conversations across media, and prioritize content for employee response.

As for e-mail’s place in Inbox 2.0, I submit that it will be front and center, as it is today. Businesses are, after all, creatures of profit, and e-mail still provides the greatest value for the lowest cost.

Could e-mail’s primacy ever be threatened? You know what they say—never say never. For the foreseeable future, however, Web 2.0 pundits would be wise not to confuse e-mail’s maturity with obsolescence. To do so might be to miss out on the Web 3.0 opportunity of a lifetime.

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[Ed. This confirms Striata's belief that the Inbox is becoming the desktop of the future, where more and more time is spent during an online session. Microsoft's Outlook 2007 is already moving towards "Inbox 2.0", by providing in-application previews of any and all attachments, without having to start a separate application.

Virgin Media monthly 50p E-Billing Discount

Virgin Media recently announced a 50p per month saving for all customers signing up for Electronic Billing.

You can read about the offer here:
http://www.virginmedia.com/customers/yourchanges.php
(scroll down towards the bottom of the page)

and sign up for the service here:
https://ebill2.virginmedia.com/ebilling/Registration.jsp


This is another example of a large investment on a web portal that can process payments. However, according to Striata, most businesses, and even users, tend to avoid logging in to portals to pay one bill. It's just too complex to have to remember login information for every bill you have to pay, particularly for small and medium sized business.

E-mail continues to be the communication medium of choice, yet most billers only offer Internet website presentment. Enticing the customer to go online and register is expensive and generally yields poor results. In addition customers continually forget their usernames and passwords, resulting in expensive phone calls to customer service centres.

In many programmes it takes between 7 and 24 clicks for a customer to find and pay his bill far too many to make the experience worth repeating. And security fears such as Phishing and identity theft are still hindering online payment. Finally, marketers are having difficulty effectively communicating the benefits to the consumer.

AN INTRODUCTION TO SECURE EBPP

There are several ways for billers to ensure that a large percentage of customers migrate to e-Billing. There should be no upfront customer registration, and no need for a customer to visit a website. Customers should not require more than a dial-up connection, and should not have to remember a username and password. The e-Bill should look the same as the paper bill that customers are used to, and they should be able to view and pay it online in under 30 seconds, or save it and pay it later.

This can all be achieved through secure e-mail billing. The e-mail billing process starts when the biller gets a customer's e-mail address commonly at account activation, or when the customer contacts the call centre. Every contact is an opportunity to get this information. A shared secret is chosen that is known only to the biller and the customer. This can be a Social Security number, Zip Code (or postal code), account number or anything else that the customer nominates (and is easy to remember).

The biller then sends the customer his next bill via secure e-mail, and the customer uses the shared secret to decrypt and open his e-Bill. The e-Bill looks exactly the same as the paper bill, and the customer can print it out if required.

The customer enters his banking details and the amount he wishes to pay in the Payment Section at the top or the bottom of the e-Bill (the amount is defaulted to the total amount due), and clicks on PAY. The transaction has been completed with just two clicks.

The payment is then automatically submitted, without the need for the customer to visit a website, and he is sent a popup and an e-mail confirming the payment. The payment flows directly into the billers bank account, exactly like any other ACH payment.

Once one or two e-bills have been successfully received and paid by the customer, the biller automatically stops sending paper bills.

Striata has found that customer feedback has been extremely positive; many said that the email bill saved them time, because they no longer needed to visit a payment centre to settle their accounts. And because they were able to choose the shared secret password themselves, they felt the system was secure.

The answer appears to be to return to basics. Stop trying to change customer behaviour and start inserting your bill into your customers daily routine. As long as you are expecting your customers to do something to turn off paper, its simply not going to happen to any significant degree. Make participation easy and adoption rates will increase to the benefit of both utilities and their customers.



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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Climate Change Concerns More Corporations - eBilling Can Help Your CSR

Climate change is increasingly topping the agenda in companies across the world. More and more businesses are searching for ways to protect the environment, and their profits.

The topic of climate change has also entered boardrooms. Top brass have warmed to the notion of cutting back on work-related flights, as well as driving cars which emit fewer emissions, and implementing green energy and electronic billing.

Susanna Monni is the Executive Director at Finnish Business and Society, a network which encourages corporations to embrace social responsibility. She said that Al Gore's Nobel and Oscar award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, delivered a powerful global message on climate change. The Stern Report, which put a price tag on the effects of climate change, also shook up the business world.

Image is also part of the bargain. Consumers in industrialised countries are increasingly selecting products with certifications of sustainability, or from companies with 'green' images.

Source: YLE News

Striata have calculated that for every 500,000 bills printed, the following environmental damage is done:
  • 13 tons of paper is used
  • 26 tons of trees are destroyed
  • 214,000 gallons of water is used
  • 25,233 pounds of solid waste is generated
  • 780 pounds of air emissions are spewed out
  • 65,754 pounds of greenhouse gases are emitted
(Using tools provided at papercalculator.org)

Implementing eBilling provides a powerful Corporate Social Responsibility message to your customers and shareholders.

How Does eBilling Work?

eBilling, or electronic billing, enables billers to create and distribute digital bills to their customers instead of printing and mailing out paper bills. The obvious advantage of e-bill from a biller perspective is related to cost, especially as postal delivery fees continue to rise.

For large, major billers, there are two predominant distribution methods for e-bill, biller-direct, and/or through a consumer service provider (CSP). Many billers choose to distribute e-bills via both channels, as opposed to just choosing one.


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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Online Bill Payments Surpass Checks for the First Time Among Internet- Connected Households

ATLANTA - A new study reported today finds that for the first time, consumers in Internet-connected households are paying more of their household bills online than by check. The survey was conducted in January 2007 by Harris Interactive and The Marketing Workshop. (Source: CheckFree Corp.).

For the first time, consumers in Internet-connected households are paying more of their bills online than by paper check, according to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive and the Marketing Workshop.

The 2007 Consumer Bill Payment Survey showed that, for the first time, online bill payments exceeded bill payments made by paper check among online households.

Online payments made up 39% of the total volume of bill payments among online households, an increase of 4 percentage points over a December 2005 survey. In contrast, the volume of checks sent through the mail fell 4 percentage points to 34% of the overall volume.

Striata has found another study by Aite Group predicts that online payments will rise to 28% by 2010. At the same time, check usage for consumer bill payment is falling rapidly, from 50% in 2005 to 27% in 2008 (also predicted by the Aite Group).

The rush to accept electronic payments has been a major driver of Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) programs for many. The focus appears to be shifting. Electronic bill presentment is now being pushed more urgently, in the hopes of reducing printing and mailing costs, and saving a few trees.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

eBilling Video Spoof

More great reasons to opt for electronic billing.
Found on YouTube - a spoof of the massive iPhone bill video.
Caution - contains strong language.

Explanation of eBilling Video

Pittsburgh blogger Justine Ezarik gets her first iPhone bill -- all 300 pages of it, detailing thousands of text messages. Watch her uncut interview with WTAE-TV's Andrew Stockey about her blog post.

What is eBilling? Video Explains All

Electronic Billing is the electronic delivery and presentation of financial statements, bills, invoices, and related information sent by a company to its customers. Electronic billing is also referred to as the following:

  • e-billing or eBilling
  • EBPP — Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment
  • EIPP — Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment

Why is eBilling a Good Idea?



View this eBilling video:






---------------------------------------------------------------

About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Electronic Billing Saves Trees - People urged to go the paperless route

BY CATHY JETT

Switch to online banking and bill paying and help to save the planet.

That's the message a number of banks and businesses soon will be using to persuade consumers to go paperless.

"Many consumers do not realize the full impact their household could make by simply asking to turn off paper bills and statements once they've adopted online banking," Stuart Williams, co-chair of the Electronic Payments Association's new "green coalition," said in a prepared statement.

A new study by Calif.-based Javelin Strategy and Research, for example, found that if all the nation's households just received and paid bills electronically, they'd save 16.5 million trees each year, or the amount of lumber needed to build 216,054 typical single-family homes.

The Electronic Payments Association's "green coalition" also plans to play up the environmentally friendly aspect of going paperless in a campaign it has begun planning. It will likely consist of information large companies can use to encourage their customers to go paperless.

"Consumers want to take individual action that can collectively lead to real impact on the environment," said Craig Vaream, the other green coalition co-chair. "Through this initiative, we want consumers to recognize that choosing electronic bills, statements and payments provides the additional benefit of eliminating the unnecessary waste of natural resources."

The ability to go online to do everything from checking bank statements to getting bills and paying them has been around since the mid-1990s when such institutions as Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo rolled out the option. But it's started to catch on only in the last few years.

Today, more than half of all households in the United States make at least one recurring payment online and four out of five consumers who use it say they are very satisfied with it, according to the Electronic Payments Association.

And direct payment, which is an automated debit from a customer's account, increased by 6.1 percent to 4.7 billion payments in 2006, it found.

At Verizon, about 1.7 million customers now get their statements online, said Angeline DePauw, the utility's director of electronic remissions. But that accounts for only about 5 percent of all the billing Verizon does.

The company is focusing on getting the 8 million customers who currently pay their Verizon bill online but continue to get paper statements to make the switch to online statements.

"They're the ones who are more apt to do it," DePauw said.
Currently, when Verizon customers sign up for online banking, their financial institution automatically enrolls them in the Electronic Billing Information Delivery System (EBID) for 90 days.

EBID will post a note on their personal online bank page saying how much their next Verizon bill is and the due date, plus provide a link to the utility company.

"Most people, if it looks reasonable, will pay," DePauw said.

Online banking also has become popular at Wachovia spokeswoman, said Christine Shaw.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank's online banking features allow customers to see all of their Wachovia accounts--including bank accounts, mortgages and investments--on one site. They also can see scanned images of their checks, and set up recurring bills so they're paid automatically.

"It's convenient," said Shaw. "You don't have to pay for a stamp, and it's real easy to transfer funds from one account to another. You can look at all your transactions online and review them online."

Wachovia also encourages customers to check their accounts frequently to head off identity fraud, she said.

Going paperless cuts down on the risk of identity fraud, which is more like to happen offline where family, friends and employees have access to financial statements, than online, according to studies done by both Javelin Strategy and Research and the Better Business Bureau in 2003.

Bruce Cundiff, Javelin's online payments expert, said his company also has found that online customers are more likely to catch identity fraud early because they can monitor their accounts anytime, not just when monthly statements arrive in their mailbox.

Soon, online customers will even be able to get messages about their accounts on their cell phones, and contact their bank, credit-card company or other financial institution immediately if something seems amiss, he said.

Mobile devices allow the conversation to be two-way, something Javelin calls "interactive financial messaging," Cundiff said.

"Say I got a mobile message saying, 'Are you trying to send $5,000 to Eastern Europe?' I can e-mail back, 'No, don't let it go.' It's actually preventing fraudulent activity by stopping it in its tracks."

Cathy Jett: 540/374-5407



---------------------------------------------------------------

About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.