The latest
option for sending cash: e-mail
Copyright © 2000 Nando Media
Copyright © 2000 Associated Press
By DAVE CARPENTER
CHICAGO (March 8, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST
http://www.nandotimes.com) - Now you can send birthday
cash, spending money for your college student or repay
your friends - all via e-mail.
The Chicago-based banking corporation,
which is formally announcing its eMoneyMail service
Wednesday, hopes to get the jump on other leading
financial institutions in an area it says has huge
potential - not only for person-to-person payments but
for companies sending rebates or refunds to their
customers.
"(E-mail payment) is the coming
thing," said Robert Sterling, financial services
analyst for New York-based Jupiter Communications.
"It's important to get in on the ground
floor."
With its product, Bank One enters a
field dominated since its emergence late last year by X.com
Corp. and PayPal.com,
which X.com is in the process of acquiring. The combined
company, still called X.com, has made its mark helping
buyers and sellers on sites such as eBay more easily
complete their transactions.
While many companies - and even the
U.S. government - wire money back and forth on a regular
basis, person-to-person electronic transactions are much
more rare. Under eMoneyMail.com, anyone in the United
States with a checking account or a Visa card can send
or receive up to $500 in cash at a time.
Here's how it works:
The sender goes to www.emoneymail.com
and chooses whether to pay by Visa credit card, Visa
debit card or checking account. He then specifies an
e-mail address for the receiver and the amount to be
sent.
The receiver then gets an e-mail
message that money has been sent, clicks on an
attachment with a link to the eMoneyMail site and
indicates which of four possible ways she wants to be
paid - the three cited above or paper check sent by
surface mail.
The sender pays a $1 fee for each
transaction; the receiver pays $1 only if a check is
requested. The money would become available the next
business day at the earliest, Bank One officials said.
But they say research indicates consumers won't use it
mainly to get cash but want a secure, convenient way to
make payments to others.
While X.com's service is similar, Bank
One claims that its name as well as its 128-bit
encryption - the highest commercially available Internet
security standard - provide an extra measure of security
and confidence that should help attract more than its
share of customers.
"Having a bank brand instantly
gives us a level of credibility that I don't think you
can get by establishing a company out of thin air,"
said Dean Lehman, senior vice president for new product
and service development.
Analyst Brook Newcomb, who follows
online banking and bill payment for Forrester Research
in Cambridge, Mass., said that while the move positions
Bank One to reach millions of potential future
customers, the immediate market may be limited.
"It's going to be people who are
comfortable using the Net to provide money, and there's
only a small minority doing that now," he said.
"I don't imagine there's going to be a whole bunch
of people signing up right away to do this."
The financial institutions with a
stake in the business disagree.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based X.com, which
does not charge a fee for its service, says both it and
PayPal have been attracting more than 10,000 new users a
day. Bank One points to research that indicates one
American adult in three uses e-mail and one in five uses
financial services online.
Lehman compares it to the initial use
of automated teller machines in 1970.
"How could we have known what
ATMs would have become?" he said. "People are
getting comfortable with this kind of thing. I think
we're opening up a whole new area of Web payments.
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