After a year of experimentation, Telefact SA, the electronic payments company established by France Telecom, Electricite de France/Gaz de France and several banks, launched its bill payment by Minitel service to all of France Telecom and Electricite clients in the Ile-de-France region. The service will be extended to the rest of the country in January. Executives from Telefact and its founders said yesterday they expect the addition of water bill and federal tax payments on the service next year. Jacques Delaballe, managing director of Telefact, said customers of water supplier Compagnie Generale des Eaux in five, as-yet unspecified geographical zones will have access to the service in January. Furthermore, taxpayers in two regions should be able to pay their taxes by Minitel viewdata sometime next year as well.
Reduced processing costs Other banks expected to join the project include Credit Commerciale de France in January. Delaballe said Credit Agricole and Societe Generale have also expressed interest in the project, shown by Societe Generale taking an ownership stake in Telefact. Telefact’s founding banks are BNP, 24%; Credit Mutuel, 7.5% and Credit du Nord, 7.5%. Delaballe said the addition of Minitel bill payment should help reduce the cost of processing traditional payments for participating companies. France Telecom and Electricite alone process 270m bills between them, of which over 50% are still processed traditionally. Emmanuel Hau, financial and legal service director for Electricite/Gaz, stressed that the Minitel service was not aimed at laying Electricite workers off. We have a billing system that works quite well. This is not a vision of reducing personnel, but of improving our customer service, he said. It was noted that the Telefact system on Minitel will not update the record of bills to pay with record of a customer who paid, exceptionally, by cheque. Could that potentially pose a problem? It’s possible, Delaballe told Computergram, and if it became a big problem for customers, Telefact would add such updating service, for a supplementary fee. It was not provided initially, he said, because our market studies show us that those who use Telefact do not pay by cheque. Those that pay by cheque continue to pay by cheque; they don’t know anything about Telefact. It is more likely, he said, that Telefact will integrate telephone access and resulting payment record updates, since customers could certainly have need of access to the service when they don’t have a Minitel handy. The tests conducted since last summer showed that 90% of those who used the service were satisfied, said Jean-Jacques Damlamian, sales director for France Telecom. The unsatisfied ones were usually those who never bothered to use it, he added. Furthermore, customers did not find the cost of a two minute session, approximately 40 cents, an obstacle to using the service. On Minitel, Telefact is accessible through its 3615 service or through the individual home banking services set up by Telefact’s participating banks. Personal access codes and verification procedures ensure secure execution of payment.
