The benefi ts of electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) are undeniable. Although its promises have been promoted for a decade, it has fi nally reached critical mass in the market with the number of electronic bill payments surpassing checks in 2006. However, the technical and fi nancial effort required for a biller to implement an in-house EBPP solution can be both challenging and expensive. As an added liability, billers are concerned about the possibility of slow customer adoption rates and the extended time it may take to recoup their investments. Alternatively, billers can outsource their EBPP needs to a consolidator, but they place themselves at the risk of losing personal contact with their customers or losing the customers themselves. An innovative alternative presented in this whitepaper is for billers to outsource their needs to an EBPP managed service provider (MSP).Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment.

Most companies conduct a signifi cant portion of their business via email. Some of the information transmitted by email includes confidential data that, if not properly secured, could damage client and business partner relationships. Companies must educate their employees to understand the risks of sending unprotected confi dential information via email. MessageLabs Policy Based {tag security:Encryption} (PBE) solution delivers distinct advantages in addressing the important issue of email security.

Getting your emails delivered.

Everyone is aware that email has become a mainstream communication tool, and each year shows increasing adoption by both business and consumers using email for everyday interaction.

In a report on US consumer email activity published by DoubleClick (Dec 2005), the research shows that email is “no longer a novelty, and is fully integrated into the personal and professional lives of most consumers.”

But how do you avoid sending (and paying for) messages that will not get delivered?

The benefi ts of electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) are undeniable. Although its promises have been promoted for a decade, it has fi nally reached critical mass in the market with the number of electronic bill payments surpassing checks in 2006. However, the technical and fi nancial effort required for a biller to implement an in-house EBPP solution can be both challenging and expensive. As an added liability, billers are concerned about the possibility of slow customer adoption rates and the extended time it may take to recoup their investments. Alternatively, billers can outsource their EBPP needs to a consolidator, but they place themselves at the risk of losing personal contact with their customers or losing the customers themselves. An innovative alternative presented in this whitepaper is for billers to outsource their needs to an EBPP managed service provider (MSP).

Slashing your bill delivery costs.

Traditional billing methods involving paper, printing and postage are expensive, time consuming and often frustrating. Paper based billing provides little in the way of tracking and reporting.

Introducing an electronic billing option can save your organization between 48% and 80% of the cost of traditional paper billing methods. Not to mention the increased control, reporting and improved customer service.

The use of email to communicate marketing and operational messages is on the increase. Your customer’s inbox is flooded with marketers hoping to catch their attention.

eMarketer reports that email volume in the United States is projected to nearly double from 1.5 trillion in 2003, to 2.7 trillion in 2007. This massive growth means you have to work harder to get your message read.

There are a number of ways in which you can manipulate how many people engage with your emails, one of which is to send your communication on the day which promises the highest read rate or the best click rate.

There are a signifi cant number of regulations in effect worldwide that relate to protection of private and sensitive data. Some are focused on protection of specific industry information, where others are more concerned with proper disclosure of data loss incidents and general privacy attributes.

Most of today’s standards and compliance regulations are concerned largely with the protection of private data at rest, during transactions, and while it traverses network connections. Some of these regulations make specific recommendations or require particular technologies for compliance. For all of them, however, encryption can be employed to satisfy the protection requirements. By determining what data you are required to protect, locating the data at rest and in transit, and implementing the appropriate encryption technologies, you can significantly improve your overall security posture while complying with any number of data privacy regulations.

The following pages describe the types of data under regulation and describe basic best practices for implementing appropriate encryption technologies. After that are tables of U.S. and international data privacy regulator overviews, how encryption applies to them, and basic best practices for those applications. They are color-coded as follows: green for fi nancial data regulations, red for medical data regulations, and blue for private individual data regulations.

Just how seriously does staff in outsourced divisions of companies take data {tag security}? And what happens if a freelancer working for the outsourced partner gets the clever idea of leaking critical company data to the competition? Inside company offices, data security can be maintained with bullet-proof access control: anyone who is not supposed to have access to confidential data is kept out. However, when parts of the company are being outsourced, the possible security risks take a back seat at many enterprises and only come to the forefront again when the contract with the outsourced services is already a done deal.

The use of email to communicate marketing and operational messages is on the increase. Your customer’s inbox is flooded with marketers hoping to catch their attention.

eMarketer reports that email volume in the United States is projected to nearly double from 1.5 trillion in 2003, to 2.7 trillion in 2007. This massive growth means you have to work harder to get your message read.

There are a number of ways in which you can manipulate how many people engage with your emails, one of which is to send your communication on the day which promises the highest read rate or the best click rate.

This white paper explores standards and regulations—some firmly in place, some emerging, others in the formative stage—and describes the recommendations or requirements they impose for using encryption and related technologies. The reader should bear in mind that this area is a fast-moving target. Today’s recommendations are tomorrow’s requirements, and new standards are arising all the time. The sooner an enterprise complies, the better positioned it is for the future.

These standards include:

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
• HIPAA
• Sarbanes-Oxley
• FISMA
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
• State Notice of Breach Laws