It's easier than ever to e-spend … or, for
that matter, to e-bank from a truck stop
By Holden Lewis • Bankrate.com

June 2, 2000 -- Legions of dot-commers are ceaselessly searching for frictionless online payment methods. And that's obviously a good thing because the easier we can pay for stuff on the Web, the more we'll buy, thus averting the collapse of stock markets and our civilization.

Online payments keep getting easier
The latest crusaders galloping to the aid of American -- nay, global -- commerce are ProPay and Remit.com, a pair of companies that will enable individuals and small businesses to send bills by e-mail and receive payments by e-mail or over the Web.

A loyal reader of this column (Hi, Mom!) might say: "I know that X.com, PayPal (which is owned by X.com), Billpoint, Tradesafe.com and eMoneyMail allow the consumer to do some or all of these things, not to mention PayMe.com. Do these newcomers offer anything new to consumers?"

ProPay does: the ability to dispute credit-card charges.

(Remit.com offers something cool to small-business owners: the ability to send electronic bills through Remit.com with the look and feel of the small business's Web site. The point of Remit.com is to remain invisible to the consumer, so I won't say anymore about it.)

Back to ProPay, a private company based in Orem, Utah. To pay for something over the Internet with the likes of PayPal and PayMe.com, you have to open an account with the service. The seller has an account, too. When you pay for something (say, an auction item) with a credit card, the money is charged to your card, deposited into your account, then transferred to the seller's account.

This is important because, as far as the credit card company is concerned, your transaction is with the payment service, not with the seller. The upshot is that if you don't receive the product that you thought you ordered, the credit card company is unlikely to go to bat for you.

With ProPay you can use the service to buy directly from the seller without having to open a ProPay account. If you're dissatisfied, you can dispute a charge through the credit card company, a powerful ally.

Billpoint allows you to dispute charges through the credit card company, too, but Billpoint is intended only for users of the eBay auction service.

ProPay says it can be used with just about any auction Web site (it's the "preferred" payment method on boxlot), and can be used in small-scale transactions such as garage sales.

You also can use it to exchange cash (for example, to pay a friend who bought your concert ticket) from your account to another via the Web, via e-mail or by beaming from one Palm personal digital assistant to another. PayPal allows you to do the same things. ProPay charges 35 cents to transfer money from your ProPay account to a checking account, while PayPal is free.

White-line fever turns into online fever?
When I was in seventh grade, C.W. McCall's song Convoy became a hit, ushering in the CB-radio-and-18-wheeler rage of 1975-77. An inspired classmate, his Adam's apple bobbing solemnly, informed listeners in our speech course that his career aspiration was to become a long-distance trucker. We understood.

I think about my classmate every once in a while, wondering if he indeed works in a truck cab. And I've always wondered how long-distance truckers receive their bills and pay them on time: yet another complication arising from a difficult job.

An institution called National InterBank plans to roll out a solution this month in conjunction with PNV, a company that provides in-cab cable TV, telephone and Internet connections to professional truckers at hundreds of truck stops. PNV Personal Banker will have the look and feel of the PNV site, but all the banking services will be offered by Irvine, Calif.-based National InterBank, the Net division of FNB-Mitchell, a bank headquartered in Indiana.

You don't have to be a transmission repairman to see that Internet banking is tailor-made for truckers. PNV Personal Banker customers will be able to bank wherever they can find an Internet connection, at home or on the road. PNV makes it possible for truckers to connect from the road, whether through Internet kiosks inside truck stops or through in-cab dialup connections available at more than 300 truck stops.

"These guys are on the road anywhere from 150 to 200 nights each year," says Ron Hynes, vice president of marketing and strategic partnerships for National InterBank. "We want to help them take care of their finances from the luxury of their cabs."

Customers will be able to pay bills online, open checking and money market accounts, transfer money and apply for credit cards. In the future, a network of ATMs in truck stops might take deposits into PNV Personal Banker accounts.

Hynes believes that Internet banking will continue in this direction, what he calls private-label banking. This summer, National InterBank plans to offer accounts to aficionados of infoportal About.com (the About Personal Banking Center) and the student site Study24-7.com (Student InterBank).

The next step is banking through employers, where employees of, say, Acme Widget Co. will be able to log onto Acme Personal Banker through the company intranet. A real bank would offer the checking accounts, ATM cards and such, but the bank pages would look like the rest of the employer's intranet. National InterBank wants to offer such services, and so does VirtualBank.

Anyone who belongs to a credit union understands the appeal of low-cost banking services for company employees.

Afterword
Last week I got e-mails from two readers, 16 minutes apart, that detailed problems they were having with their online banks. Both readers mentioned a term I had never come across before: "customer escalation."

I found it a somewhat disquieting term. In the 1970s and '80s, the word "escalation" implied an increased level of death and destruction. If a hijacking turned into a murder spree, that was an escalation. Or if a conventional war turned into a nuclear war, that would be an escalation. Did "customer escalation" mean that frustrated bank tellers would leap the counter at us?

No. The '70s and '80s are long past, and in the friendly double-aughts, the word "escalation" is supposed to make us feel comforted -- pampered, even. You know when you talk to a customer-service rep for a bank, and that person can't help you, so you talk to a supervisor? In customer-service parlance, you've been "escalated."

So next time you talk to a "customer escalation administrator," try not to feel the urge to duck and cover.

-- Posted: June 2, 2000