Peter J. Kight is in the business of getting you to stick to your bank.

Kight is chief executive of Norcross-based CheckFree Corp., the company behind the technology that allows you to pay your bills online and, in many cases, receive your billing statements via the Web.

Brant Sanderlin/Staff (ENLARGE)

Peter J. Kight, CheckFree CEO: 'The organic growth has come because we're in the position that we're offering technology that's faster, better and cheaper.'

AT A GLANCE • Clickable ticker: CKFR • Headquarters: Norcross • CEO: Peter J. Kight • Employees: 3,400 • Business: Provides electronic billing and payments services, funds transfer to business, government customers internationally. • Online: checkfree.com REVENUE • 2005: $757.8 million • 2004: $606.4 million • 2003: $551.6 million • 2002: $490.4 million • 2001: $433.3 million NET INCOME • 2005: $46.8 million • 2004: $10.5 million • 2003: ($52.1 million) • 2002: ($440.9 million) • 2001: ($363.1 million) NET INCOME PER SHARE • 2005: 50 cents • 2004: 11 cents • 2003: (59 cents) • 2002: ($5.04) • 2001: ($4.49) WANT REPRINTS? Our provider can reformat articles, with accompanying photos and graphics. Get more information on custom reprints — and custom plaques.

CheckFree, which had profits of $46.8 million in the fiscal year that ended last June 30 on revenue of $757.8 million, has managed to ride the wave of consumers who have migrated to their laptops and desktops to conduct their banking.

Since being founded in 1981 and then going public in 1995, CheckFree has netted 19 of the top 25 financial institutions as clients of its bill-pay services, including Bank of America Corp. and SunTrust Banks Inc.

Analysts say CheckFree has benefited from Kight's ability to anticipate consumer trends and capitalize on them to grow the company, which he founded.

"We bet a long time ago that the banks were going to win the consumers' hearts and minds, and where the consumers were going to go," Kight said of bank customers' adoption of online banking.

Consumers' use of broadband technology and banks' move to free online banking from a fee-based model also helped CheckFree grow its business, analysts said.

It was cheaper for the banks, and consumers liked the speed and ease of being able to conduct their banking business virtually whenever they want.

"But the banks, they didn't just lower their costs, they made money," Kight said.

Showing them how to cut costs was just one part of the equation, he said. The other part was offering bundled services — getting billing statements and bill pay — on the bank's Web site. Doing so makes them "stickier" customers, less likely to leave, because they have multiple services provided by the bank beyond checking and savings accounts.

Kight said his strategy has been to look for niches where there wasn't any competition, spend the money to build the infrastructure in that space and get the jump on its rivals.

"We're going only in those places where there is no network," he said. "And we're only going into those places where it's not going to be easy to copy what we do."

Some 35 million consumers in the United States pay their bills online; that figure is expected to nearly double to 65 million by 2007, according to research firm Gartner. That leaves a lot of room for potential growth.

"The organic growth has come because we're in the position that we're offering technology that's faster, better and cheaper," Kight said.

Analysts agree, and say CheckFree has managed to grow while meeting banks' demands to lower costs.

"There's constant pressure for CheckFree to lower their costs, but the nice thing about this business is there's a lot of scale," said Kartik Mehta, a business services analyst who follows CheckFree for FTN Midwest Securities.

"It allows them, as transactions grow, to lower the costs per bank, yet maintain their margins."

But Kight said he's not trying to limit CheckFree to one-trick-pony status.

"We've been focused on strategically growing our reach," he said.

In addition to going after the bill-pay and presentment businesses of banks that aren't already customers, CheckFree sees the unbanked population — roughly 20 percent of U.S. consumers don't have bank accounts — as well as those consumers who prefer to pay their bills in person as another avenue for growth.

The company is marketing its walk-in bill-pay service as a lower-cost alternative to businesses like utility companies doing it in-house. And it sees pay-by-phone — where consumers can pay bills over the telephone either because they prefer to pay quickly or wait until the last minute — as another growth option.

"We're not interested in market leadership for the sake of market leadership," Kight said. "If you have defined market leadership, that means our competitors are following us to compete with us."

Mehta, the business services analyst, says that is a good strategy.

"They cannot control what banks do, but they can control the types of products they provide and the value they provide," he said of CheckFree's offerings.

That counterbalances the constant demand for lower prices, because CheckFree isn't just defining its value to banks by costs.

The company is showing banks that it's helping create a stronger bank-customer relationship, which, in turn, is better for the bank's bottom line.

"They are a much stickier customer," Mehta said.