Checkfree Eyes Quickbooks for Payment System

Checkfree Corp. is developing wholesale electronic payment services that could include the use of Intuit's Quickbooks accounting software.

Peter J. Kight, Checkfree's chairman and chief executive, disclosed the plan at the Bank Administration Institute's payment system conference in Washington last week.

Mr. Kight was discussing the rationale of Checkfree's pending purchase of Intuit Inc.'s payment processing subsidiary, Intuit Services Corp. He said Intuit's popular Quickbooks could play a role in improving Checkfree's banking services.

P. Sue Perrotty, chief information and technology officer at CoreStates Financial Corp., said Checkfree wants to help banks offer more complete lines of business services. She said it is "actually building code to allow small businesses to be linked to their accounting systems and to their banks."

Elliott McEntee, president of the National Automated Clearing House Association, said the resulting bank-branded services should be popular.

Small companies have had to cope with the high costs of automating information exchanges between electronic bill payment and accounting systems.

"What Quickbooks will enable you to do is to integrate all of that inexpensively with assistance from Checkfree," Mr. McEntee said.

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