JOURNAL ARTICLE:
It's easier than ever to e-spend or, for that matter, to e-bank from a truck stop.
By Holden Lewis
June 2, 2000 --
Online payments keep getting easier: T
he 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. ProPay does: the ability to dispute credit-card charges.
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.
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.
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.
-- Posted: June 2, 2000
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