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EFT: What, from a strategic standpoint, are you looking to do as you move forward with this functionality? How do you leverage what you've accomplished here, going forward?
Grove: We were right in the middle of one of the biggest deals in the EBPP space and we were party to a number of innovations. The way we're trying to leverage this is to build thought capital around the ideas generated here and to look for other opportunities to do similar implementations, or implementations that leverage part of the thought capital that we came up with.

EFT: Talk to me a little bit about the issue of verification and why it's becoming a particularly important aspect of a lot of these types of deals that we're seeing right now.
Grove: It's a tremendously important area because there's both great risk that you enter by not appropriately identifying people, and there's great opportunity to be had by verifying people quickly and getting them paying bills more quickly. The thing to remember about verification of identity is you can never be totally sure, there's always risk. Even if I go and present my driver's license to you in person, it's quite possible that I've forged my driver's license. But the questions you want to ask are what's the benefit to verifying people faster and taking on more risk and what's the cost of taking on more risk. In doing this analysis, we decided that an on-line process that for the most part handled all contingencies really reduces the risk of fraud. The benefit of having that online process outweighed the risks created by not having an off-line process.

EFT: Clearly, there are a lot of verification capabilities that are kicking around in the market. One of the most popular applications that we see is if you're trying to get on an auction site or if you're trying to participate in some sort of credit extension or merchant-type arrangement where there is a big fraud component, where you really do need to know that Person X is Person X or the card really belongs to the person that is using the number. How often do we run into that type of situation in an EBPP marketplace?
Grove: The risk is primarily in the payment space, not in the
presentment space, and the risk is that you're giving someone access to a bank account to make payments. It's unlikely that someone would use that to pay themselves because there would be a record of who's being paid, but it's not unreasonable to believe that someone might pay an anonymous bank account and use it to transfer funds.

EFT: So essentially what we're doing here is trying to curtail risk that's just inherently associated with these ACH debits.
Grove: Exactly. You're giving access to a bank account, there are certainly very obvious risks attached to that. You can mitigate some of those risks by limiting the amount of a funds transfer and doing things of that nature, but by and large you still have to be pretty sure that Person X is Person X.

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