'E' for efficiency in account information.

The United States Postal Service doesn't call it "third-class mail" any more - now it's called "standard." But if it walks like a duck, and quacks Like a duck... well, you know.

Bank One Corp. of Chicago recently worked with Xpedite, an outsourced distribution provider, to develop a system that simplifies and streamlines the task of communicating with the bank's business customers without the need to trot down to the post office every day, or even to have the post office come to the bank. Xpedite calls the system messageREACH, and it enables Bank One to offer "Direct Delivery Business E-Mail"-electronic delivery of encrypted account information.

This was no easy task. Bank One is the nation's fifth-largest bank holding company, the third-largest bank lender to small businesses, one of the nation's top 25 managers of mutual funds and the nation's largest issuer of Visa credit cards. It also operates 1,800 branches and a national ATM network, and it holds assets of more than $270 billion.

With its new system, Bank One batches customer statements and other information and sends it-to Xpedite, which encrypts the information, addresses the e-mail messages and sends it out to customers. Each customer has a password phrase that permits him to decipher the encrypted message. The password phrase, which changes daily, is based on "unique variables" contained in the message itself.

The system is, for practical purposes, instantaneous, says Virginia Edgerton, Bank One's direct delivery product manager, which means (among other things) that clients can update their account status and issue end-of-the-month reports as soon as the month is over.

Outsourcing the function meant that Bank One was saved the time and expense of establishing its own internal distribution system.

The advantages of the system, in addition to the obvious advantages of speeding transactions in an efficient manner, include the reduced load it imposes on Bank One's own internal systems and the cost reductions achieved by eliminating overprinting of mailing materials and reduced costs for customer-service staffing.

And the bank can follow the trail of each communication. By entering a specific job number, Bank One employees can see an audit trail for all its e-mails.