CKFR Checkfree Corp (MM)

Atos Origin Sweden Expands Its CheckFree-Based Electronic Billing Service Across Europe ATLANTA and LONDON, March 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CheckFree i-Solutions, a subsidiary of CheckFree Corporation , today announced that the Sweden-based biller service provider (BSP), Atos Origin Sweden AB (formerly SchlumbergerSema), has further expanded its European electronic billing services offering. Supported by the market-leading CheckFree i-Series platform, Atos Origin Sweden now provides electronic billing services to one of the largest pan-European telecommunications operators and one of Sweden's major banks, with expertise in both business and consumer markets. When Atos decided to add electronic billing to its traditional print and mail services early in 2002, the company looked at several leading systems integrators as well as the two leading software products on the market. CheckFree and its technology partner, Emitto Nordic, weighed in with several major advantages. "We chose Emitto Nordic as our systems integrator because they offered the best service, and CheckFree i-Solutions was another obvious choice with the leading electronic billing software product in the world," said Roger Wrede, Head of e-Billing Business/Output Services at Atos Origin Sweden. "We believed CheckFree's experience working with leading billers and its history of solid successes would be a major advantage when dealing with the complexities of developing our billing service provider solution for major billing clients across Europe. The i-Series software platform was sophisticated yet flexible, easy to work with, and it easily integrated into our existing archiving systems." Rolling out across Europe Atos began implementation of the CheckFree i-Series billerservice provider e-billing system in March 2002. Two months later it went live with its first customer, a Swedish bank. By June, the service was being rolled out to a select customer base of Atos' second major biller, one of Europe's leading alternative fixed and mobile telecommunications companies. Atos' e-billing service was soon extended across Europe, starting with telecommunication clients in Germany. Now customers in Austria, Spain and Italy are also receiving electronic bills, with a Frenchservice currently under development. Altogether, the Atos e-billing service will soon be available to almost 10 million business-to-business (B2B) and business-to- consumer (B2C) telecommunication customers across five countries, which is half of its total customer base. The entire Atos electronic billing infrastructure is run from a single central data center based in Sweden. Value-added services for business Although initially focused on B2C subscribers, Atos' electronic billing service has become increasingly focused on the telecommunications B2B market, enabled by the comprehensive suite of CheckFree i-Series business support tools. For telecommunications end-users, these value-added services include corporate hierarchy mapping and split-billing, rapidly customizable invoice summary layouts, flexible data access and accounts payable workflow tools. Atos will expand its business-enabled e-billing, not just in the telecommunication industry but across a range of industries from financial services and manufacturing to distribution and retail. Other billers signing up to the Atos service include a large manufacturing company that issues a high volume of invoices to retailers globally. Each of these invoices can contain thousands of line items relating to component purchases, making electronic billing and its bundled services highly attractive to B2B customers. Electronic Billing and Payment for online banks Atos is also staking a claim in Europe's fast-growing e-billing market for Internet banks. Its flagship financial services customer is one of Sweden's largest banks with 6.5 million customers -- over a third of which are online banking users. In addition to handling the bank's print-based invoices, Atos has been hosting the bank's electronic billing and payment service for the past 18 months. Central to this back-end service is CheckFree's powerful i-Series BSP server, which is also connected to Sweden's other major Internet banks. This arrangement gives customers the freedom to pay their major credit cards and a range of other bills from any e-bank portal in the country. Archiving goes electronic Another popular offering is Atos' invoice retrieval service, powered by a real-time archiving solution. Traditionally this service has been available for printed invoices only, but with CheckFree i-Series' ability to integrate with legacy archive data, Atos can now harness its e-billing repository to provide a paperless solution that is both speedy and cost efficient. "In just under two years, Atos Origin Sweden has developed a very sophisticated pan-European e-billing service with strong growth potential. Its pioneering Web-based services for banks in Sweden are another example of how the application of e-Billing and e-Statement technology for online banks can improve the customer experience," said Steve Wright, Director, Global Marketing for CheckFree i-Solutions. "CheckFree is proud to see that the i-Series technology is being applied so successfully within such a wide range of applications and looks forward to supporting Atos' far-reaching expansion plans into new markets." About Atos Origin ( http://www.atosorigin.com/ ) Atos Origin is an international information technology (IT) services company. Its businessis turning client vision into results through the application of consulting, systems integration and managed operations. The company's annual revenues are more than EUR 5 billion and it employs 50,000 people in 50 countries. Atos Origin's client list includes ABN AMRO, Akzo Nobel, Alstom, BNP Paribas, BP, Ericsson, EDF, Euronext, Fiat, France Telecom, ICI, ING, KPN, Lucent, Philips, Renault, Royal Bank of Scotland, Saudi Aramco, Schlumberger, Shell, Telecom Italia, UBS, Unilever, Vivendi Universal and Vodafone. Atos Origin is quoted on the Paris Euronext Premier Marche and trades as Atos Origin, AtosEuronext, Atos Worldline, Atos KPMG Consulting and Atos Odyssee. About CheckFree ( http://www.checkfreecorp.com/ ) CheckFree (NASDAQ:CKFR) is the leading provider of financial electronic commerce services and products. Founded in 1981 and celebrating its 23rd year in e-commerce, CheckFree is comprised of three divisions: Electronic Commerce, Software, and Investment Services. CheckFree launched the first fully integrated electronic billing and payment solution in 1997. In the quarter ended December 31, 2003, more than 12 million consumers initiated online payments through services offered by CheckFree's Electronic Commerce division. Electronic billing and payment is available through more than a thousand financial services organizations, including banks, brokerage firms, Internet portals and personal financial management (PFM) software. At these sites, consumers are able to electronically receive and pay essentially all the bills most common to a U.S. household. CheckFree delivers 18.5 million e-bills each quarter. CheckFree Investment Services provides a broad range of investment management services to thousands of financial institutions nationwide. The division's clients manage more than 1.4 million portfolios totaling more than $700 billion in assets. CheckFree's Software division provides solutions through three operating units: CheckFree ACH Solutions, CheckFree Financial and ComplianceSolutions (CFACS), and CheckFree i-Solutions. CheckFree ACH Solutions provides software and services that are used to process more than two-thirds of the nation's nine billion Automated Clearing House payments, while CFACS provides reconciliation, financial messaging, workflow and compliance software and services to more than 600 organizations in the banking, brokerage, investment management, insurance and credit card industries, among others. CheckFree i-Solutions is the leading provider of e-billing and e-statement software and services for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business applications. Certain of CheckFree's statements in this press release are not purely historical, and as such are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These include statements regarding management's intentions, plans, beliefs, expectations or projections of the future. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including without limitation, the various risks inherent in CheckFree's business, and other risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in CheckFree's periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including CheckFree's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2003 (filed September 15, 2003), and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2003 (filed November 13, 2003) and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2003 (filed February 12, 2004). One or more of these factors have affected, and could in the future affect CheckFree's business and financial results in future periods, and could cause actual results to differ materially from plans and projections. There can be no assurance that the forward-looking statements made in this press release will prove to be accurate, and issuance of such forward-looking statements should not be regarded as a representation by CheckFree, or any other person, that the objectives and plans of CheckFree will be achieved. All forward- looking statements made in this press release are based on information presently available to management, and CheckFree assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. DATASOURCE: CheckFree Corporation CONTACT: Media, Judy DeRango Wicks, +1-678-375-1595, or , or Investor relations, Tina Moore, +1-678-375-1278, or , both of CheckFree Corporation Web site: http://www.checkfreecorp.com/ http://www.atosorigin.com/ Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/821650.html

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