As the bill payment and presentment powerhouse Checkfree announced it would partner with an Internet portal last week, analysts and the media were quick to paint the move as a rejection of banks, which were moving on-line too slowly.

By hooking up with a major portal–Checkfree has not yet identified its partner as of Financial Modernization Report’s deadline, although many industry insiders suspect it to be Yahoo!–Checkfree is planning to put the process of consumers moving to conduct their business over the Internet on the fast track, leaving the banking industry in the dust.

But, there is hope–if you’re a big bank. E-commerce industry analysts suspect that the move will not shut banks out completely, as long as they have the dollars to buy their way onto some other portal.

Citibank and Bank One, for instance, have become the exclusive branded banks with Netscape and Excite!, respectively. The access hasn’t come cheap, each one costing in the ballpark of $100 million, but bankers figure the traffic will pay the price. One industry analyst said that banks are not going to make money with the fees from bill presentment and payment anyhow, and the value to the bank of allowing customers to pay their bills on-line is to get their attention so they can sell them more profitable products.

Ironically, Checkfree’s main competitor is in fact a bank. Citibank has partnered with Microsoft in the race to come up with the best Internet billing mousetrap. Even more ironic, said Avivah Litan, director of research for the Gartner Group, is that the Microsoft venture, renamed Transpoint, is really not the formidable threat the industry frets about. The firm’s pilot program, promised and delayed for more than a year, is still not ready for public consumption. Litan said the industry is frightened of the name brand, but there is little substance to back it up. One sticking point is that the piece of technology Citibank was supposed to bring to the venture, called Pay Anyone, has yet to work. The idea behind Pay Anyone is that the customer can pay all of his or her bills on-line, whether or not all of them have been presented by the vendor. Litan said she believes Pay Anyone, which Citibank had developed for its own banking operation, and now must adapt to fit many, is necessary to compete effectively with Checkfree.