Integrion Financial Network LLC said it would have a bill presentment service in operation by the end of the year.
The Internet banking consortium, now controlled by three primary bank owners, plans to aggregate bills from any entity that publishes them and to make them available-through bank Web sites only-to consumers.
"We believe there will be hundreds of bill publishers," said William M. Fenimore Jr., chief executive officer and managing director of Integrion. He said corporations will continue to publish bills directly, banks will publish them on behalf of their corporate customers, and aggregators like Checkfree Holdings Corp. and Transpoint will continue to publish bills from companies they sign up.
Integrion envisions itself as a neutral consolidator of bills from all organizations.
"We're Switzerland," Mr. Fenimore said. "Checkfree will have problems getting bills from Transpoint" and vice versa, but "we will get bills from both places."
Integrion does not plan to solicit corporations directly for bill presentment services. It would rely on banks to do that.
Steve Ledford, senior vice president of Global Concepts Inc. in Norcross, Ga., said Integrion's plan to present the bills through bank Web sites "keeps them (banks) in the loop. Conceivably this could be done by Yahoo, Excite, or Quicken.com."
Integrion, which is majority-owned by Bank One Corp., Bank of America Corp., and Washington Mutual, plans to build a directory of billers, the consumers they bill, and where those consumers bank.
Consumers would receive updated versions of their bills every time they logged onto the participating bank's Web site. Integrion would also track the payment requirements of each biller and execute those payments.
"Our directive is to represent a bank's biller base," Mr. Fenimore said.
Integrion already is offering with Bank One a portion of the service it plans. It currently pulls bills from Checkfree's E-bill server and downloads them to Bank One's Web site on a daily basis. Eventually it would pull bills from other sources as well.
Mr. Fenimore said he expects Bank of America, which recently announced an initiative to publish its own corporate customers' bills, will integrate its system with Integrion's. This would let the bank's retail customers receive bills from corporations that are not customers of the bank, Mr. Fenimore said. Bank of America officials were not able to confirm the arrangement.
As Integrion's "mass of consumers and billers grows, we will demand use of the IFX standard," Mr. Fenimore said. He was referring to Interactive Financial Exchange, a combination of two competing specifications: IBM's Gold and OFX, the Open Financial Exchange developed by Checkfree, Intuit Inc., and Microsoft Corp.
Integrion has more than 700,000 subscribers on its Interactive Financial Services platform and it is increasing the number by about 2,500 a day. The average volume is six to seven transactions per subscriber per month.
Mr. Fenimore expects Integrion will be servicing one to two million subscribers by the end of this year and 2.5 million by the end of 2000.
