| [Computerworld, 29 October 1999] April, 1999. Xiao-qin is an office assistant working for a trading house in Guangzhou. It's that time of the month ?he needs to pay the company's phone and pager bills. For anyone who is not familiar with the way payment for utility services is accomplished over the border, here's what Xiao-qin's payment journey would typically involve. Arriving at the nearest Guangzhou Telecommunications Bureau (GTB) branch at 9:30 a.m., Xiao-qin finds there are already three long queues of people crowding in the spacious office, waiting to have their bills settled slowly, step by step. Xiao-qin looks more closely and realizes that the queues are for different purposes. The first one is for getting the company's bills printed. In China, utilities do not mail monthly invoices to subscribers as most cities are not well structured with well-defined addresses. Instead, users have to collect their bills at designated utility offices. |  |
While the second queue is for payment collection and receipt issuance, the last one is for receipt stamping by officers from the taxation bureau for true-copy verification. Waiting at the end of the first queue, Xiao-qin murmurs to himself, "This is probably where I'll end up for the rest of the day."
The scenario seems foreign to us living in Hong Kong, but that is what companies and households in every Chinese city endure every month - except, finally, in Guangzhou.
After planning and testing for almost two years, GTB in May introduced the country's first public electronic payment processing system, dubbed Pay Easy. The system integrates GTB's bill issuing and payment processing procedures with the verification function performed by the Guangzhou Authority Office (GAO) of State Administration of Taxation.
Spectra Technologies, a Hong Kong-based developer of electronic transaction systems for banking and financial institutions, undertook the entire Pay Easy project, including software development and hardware integration. Under the project, 70 units of Spectra's Universal Electronic Money Manager (UEMM) were installed in 33 GTB branches throughout the city of Guangzhou. The UEMM terminals are linked to a Compaq Computer/Tandem host residing in GTB's headquarters in the Tian He District via lease lines or dial-up connection.
While payment for telecommunication services used to take as much as an entire day to accomplish, the new Pay Easy system allows it to be done in less than a minute. Debit card holders from two major banks in the city, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Agricultural Bank of China, can now walk into any GTB branch at any time that's convenient to them. All they have to do is to swipe their cards through the UEMM terminals installed in the branch, insert their PINs, select the service category and key in their telephone or pager numbers. The amount due will then be displayed on the terminal screen. After pressing the confirm button, money will automatically be transferred from the card holders' bank accounts to GTB.
For the purpose of verification, the terminal prints out receipts with GAO's official stamp. The entire process takes about 30 to 60 seconds.
According to GTB, Pay Easy now handles about 100,000 transactions per month, or 2.5 percent of the total transactions.
Summarizing the benefits brought by the Pay Easy system, Yu Xin, chief engineer at GTB, said, "By using self-service payment terminals, both GAO and we are able to eliminate costly duplicated labor, improve productivity, enhance customer service and optimize payment processing efficiency. Our customers, which are the people of Guangzhou city, do not have to queue three times in our branches on a monthly basis."
"By accessing technology, now bill settlement can be a pleasant task for our customers," he said, adding that the integrated electronic payment system has set a milestone in China. It is the first time that GAO has used technology instead of manpower for verification
GTB is currently undergoing the second phase of the project and will have an additional 100 UEMM terminals installed by the end of the year. GTB expects the systems will process 300.000 transactions per month by that time, and is talking with other utilities to have Pay Easy handle their payments as well.
