Charter One Throws a Fastball.

Banking is a little like baseball: You throw your best pitch out there and hope somebody swings at it. At Cleveland's Charter One Bank--to stretch an already-strained metaphor--the pitch is so successful that the game's gone into extra innings.

In an effort to introduce its new electronic bill payment service, Charter One added a new wrinkle to its ongoing MegaReward program: Sign up for electronic bill presentment and pay your bills online, and Charter One will award one point for every dollar you spent. Since online bill payment costs customers nothing (at present), bank officials figured it would result in a Lot of new business.

They figured right.

The program began in January. By the end of June, more than 35,000 customers had signed up (out of a total of about 125,000 online banking customers). Online bill-paying expenditures mushroomed from about $2 million during the first month of the program to $36 million in July, and the company decided to extend the program through August

The bank decided early on not to charge extra for the bill-paying service because, as Mark Grossi, executive vice president for retail banking, says, "We don't believe you can charge a customer for something they don't believe they need or want." In a year or two, when Grossi anticipates the number of bill-pay clients will approach 100,000, it might be a different matter. The advantage of getting the program off to a quick start, he says, is that "If you get the big adoption rate early on you can keep that charge very low."