Media relations contact:
CheckFree
Judy DeRango Wicks
(678)375-1595
jdwicks@checkfree.com
Investor relations contact:
CheckFree
Tina Moore
(678)375-1278
tmoore@checkfree.com
Valero Energy Corporation:
Mary Rose Brown
(210)370-2314
maryrose.brown@valero.com
Increased Convenience, Financial Control and Time Savings Among the Many Benefits
Credit Card Holders Across the United States Will Experience
ATLANTA (November 11, 2002) æ CheckFree i-Solutions, the leading provider of interactive e-billing and e-statement software and services and part of CheckFree Corporation (NASDAQ: CKFR), and Valero Energy Corporation (NYSE: VLO), which owns Diamond Shamrock Corner Stores®, Stop N Go®, Ultramar®, Valero®, Beacon® and Total® retail outlets, today announced that electronic billing and payment services are available to Valero’s more than one million retail customers. Valero provides gasoline credit card services to about 3,000 retail sites in 16 states, including Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming.
Through its new, direct relationship with CheckFree i-Solutions, Valero will offer customers an online billing and payment option and will add a new biller direct electronic billing service, UltraQuick‰ Online, provided by CheckFree i-Solutions. At the site, Valero customers can view their bills and schedule payments using their checking or money market accounts. While visiting www.valero.com, customers can also take advantage of other online services offered by Valero, including a store locator, a general and specialty merchandise store, and application and instant processing for its consumer and commercial credit cards.
Online billing and payment services provide Valero’s credit card users with an easy, efficient way to gain more control over the payment of their monthly bills. Customers can quickly retrieve and review the same billing information they currently receive by mail. With a few clicks of the mouse, the customer can choose the payment date, rather than trying to remember when they need to mail the payment to ensure arrival by the due date. As a result, Valero customers will no longer have to spend time writing checks, manually recording the payments, stuffing envelopes and locating stamps to pay their credit card bill. Unlike paper payments, customers who pay their bills electronically through CheckFree are protected by the CheckFree Guarantee against late fees resulting from processing delays, as well as liability for unauthorized transactions. All payment information is stored on a single, secure online site for record keeping purposes.
"We’re excited to offer our customers this quick and easy solution to bill payment through our Valero website. Our customers already enjoy the fast, convenient and friendly services we offer through our retail sites. Now they’ll be able to pay their bills just as easily through UltraQuickTM online," said Gary Arthur Jr., senior vice president of marketing for Valero Energy Corporation. "Through our relationship with CheckFree, Valero’s customers have the freedom to decide how and where they would like to make their credit card bill payments."
"It is clear that Valero is dedicated to offering its customers choices and variety in order to increase their satisfaction," said Tom Stampiglia, president of CheckFree i-Solutions. "We believe Valero customers will appreciate the new options they have been given for payment methodsæthey can view and pay their bill directly at www.valero.com, a site with which they might already be familiar, or they can pay all their bills at the online destination that is most convenient for them."
Through its relationship with CheckFree, Valero retail credit card customers can enroll for the service through www.valero.com, the CheckFree distribution network of more than 650 banks, portals, credit unions, personal financial management (PFM) software, or www.checkfree.com.
By enrolling at their choice of bank, brokerage, credit union, Internet portal sites or PFM, Valero customers can receive and pay other bills from a growing number of telephone, mortgage, insurance, credit card companies, newspaper publishers and more. Consumers can also use "pay everyone" services to make payments from their computers to anyone to whom they would write a check. This includes all payments such as charitable deductions and money sent to individuals, such as children in college. To find out what bills are available online and to help identify which site is best suited for bill paying needs, consumers can visit www.checkfree.com/freedom.
Valero has provided its retail customers with online payment solutions since late 2000. Since that time, Valero has given credit card holders the ability to receive and pay bills at their choice of hundreds of CheckFree-powered Web sites.
About Valero Energy Corporation
Valero Energy Corporation is a Fortune 500 company based in San Antonio, with more than 22,000 employees and annual revenues of nearly $30 billion. The company currently owns and operates 12 refineries in the United States and Canada with a combined throughput capacity of approximately two million barrels per day, making it one of the nation’s top refiners of petroleum products. Valero is also one of the nation’s leading retail operators with approximately 4,500 retail outlets in the United States and Canada under various brand names including Diamond Shamrock®, Stop N Go®, Ultramar®, Valero®, Beacon® and Total®.
About CheckFree i-Solutions (www.checkfreeisolutions.com)
As a software group within CheckFree Corporation, CheckFree i-Solutions is the leading provider of end-to-end business-to-consumer and business-to-business solutions for e-billing and payment and e-statement delivery. CheckFree i-Solutions offers CheckFree
i-Series software for e-bill and e-statement creation, i-Processing services that include payment and distribution through about 657 financial services sites and customer care, and i-Hosting services that accommodate software hosting and full-service outsourcing. With 265 billers under contract, CheckFree i-Solutions is committed to helping billers, financial services organizations and biller service providers leverage electronic bills and statements as interactive conduits to customer relationship management, marketing and customer self service applications.
About CheckFree (www.checkfreecorp.com)
CheckFree (NASDAQ: CKFR) is the leading provider of financial electronic commerce services and products. Founded in 1981 and celebrating its 22nd year in e-commerce, CheckFree is comprised of three divisions: Electronic Commerce, Software, and Investment Services. CheckFree launched the first fully integrated electronic billing and payment solution in 1997. In the quarter ended September 30, 2002, more than seven million consumers initiated online payments through services offered by CheckFree`s Electronic Commerce division. The company has multi-year contracts with 265 of the nation`s top billers to provide online billing and payment through 657 financial services organizations, including banks, brokerage firms, Internet portals and content sites and personal financial management (PFM) software. CheckFree Investment Services provides a broad range of investment management services to thousands of financial institutions nationwide. The division`s clients manage about 1.2 million portfolios totaling more than $500 billion in assets.
CheckFree`s Software division provides solutions through three operating units: CheckFree ACH Solutions, CheckFree Financial and Compliance Solutions (CFACS), and CheckFree i-Solutions. CheckFree ACH Solutions provides software and services that are used to process more than two-thirds of the nation`s eight billion Automated Clearing House payments, while CFACS provides reconciliation and compliance software and services to more than 400 organizations in the banking, brokerage, utility, retail, insurance and credit card industries, among others. CheckFree i-Solutions is the leading provider of e-billing and e-statement software and services for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business applications, with more billers as clients than all of its competitors have combined.
Certain of the Company`s statements in this press release are not purely historical, and as such are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These include statements regarding management`s intentions, plans, beliefs, expectations or projections of the future. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including without limitation, the various risks inherent in the Company`s business, and other risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in the Company`s periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Company`s Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2002 (filed September 26, 2002).
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