Franklin Roosevelt, never considered the biggest friend of banks, would probably be amused that an international consortium of financial institutions named its new online payment standard after his wife. Project Eleanor, so tagged because the group's first working meeting was convened in New York's Roosevelt Hotel, is the brainchild of Identrus, a bank group formed to provide a structure for e-commerce.
There are grand hopes for Eleanor, which is designed to become a secure, non-proprietary, global system that all companies could use as the online equivalent of checks. As a check is accepted universally by banks and companies, so too would an Eleanor payment, Identrus hopes.
Eleanor's security is provided by Identrus' digital certificate system, which those making or accepting payments use to validate their identities. Here's the process: A corporate buyer with a digital certificate issued by its bank sends an Eleanor payment to its vendor, whose bank must also participate in Eleanor.
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Eleanor provides six different types of payments. A payment order provides immediate payment to the vendor. A payment obligation commits the buyer to paying by a specified date, and a vendor could use it to get an advance from its bank. A conditional payment obligation commits the buyer to paying once certain conditions have been fulfilled. All of Eleanor's payments can be tied to remittance information.
Eleanor's structure could provide the framework for putting online trade finance, which currently involves bundles of documents. A seller's bank could make a secondary market or securitize such obligations.
But Eleanor is even more versatile. A pilot currently underway at a major U.S. pharmaceutical company uses it to re-engineer another paper-laden, time-consuming process–contracting with clinical researchers to do drug trials. This involves gathering data from researchers and then paying them. Four Identrus banks are participating: U.S.-based Wells Fargo, ABN Amro of the Netherlands, Germany's HypoVereinsbank and Japan's UFJ Bank. "From the drug maker's standpoint, it's about making it a more efficient business process," says Jim Parker, senior vice president of product management for Identrus, noting the company's interest in getting drugs to market quickly. "The more time they can compress in the testing phase, the better."
Eleanor's digital certificates will provide a more robust way of identifying clinicians as they log onto the drug maker's Web site and submit data, Parker says. The pharmaceutical company will also use the infrastructure to make some payments electronically in the fourth quarter, he says, adding that it eventually hopes Eleanor will help clinicians to provide better organized data.
Meanwhile, Identrus banks are close to signing up more companies to use Eleanor, Parker says.
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