Wachovia Corp. is joining the handful of banks striving to equip corporate customers with electronic bill presentment capabilities.
The Winston-Salem, N.C.-based bank announced last week that it had signed a letter of intent with InvoiceLink Corp. to market software that would let its corporate clients send bills over the Internet.
Wachovia is the first customer of InvoiceLink, which aims to let billers bypass the services of companies such as Checkfree Corp. and Transpoint, which consolidate bills from multiple corporations at a single Web site.
InvoiceLink said it intends to market its software primarily through banks. It has directly signed up one biller, North State Telephone of High Point, N.C.
"There is tremendous attention on the part of corporate customers to look to banks as a channel for bill payment and presentment," said Larry Hoskins, senior vice president for treasury services at Wachovia. "A company like InvoiceLink is working toward banks' facilitating that. We think it is a great strategy."
At least two other banks are taking a similar tack. Using software developed in-house, Chase Manhattan Corp. and First Union Corp. intend to help their corporate clients present bills electronically to retail customers.
Aiming for the business-to-business market, PNC Bank and Northern Trust have developed software to let their large corporate customers send bills electronically to smaller business trading partners.
Wachovia's announcement, made by its corporate side, comes just days after the retail side said it would test Transpoint, the bill presentment service of Microsoft Corp., First Data Corp., and Citigroup. The pilot would let 100 of Wachovia's on-line banking customers gain access to their bills over the Internet.
With InvoiceLink, large billers can let retail customers opt to receive bills at the biller's site, their bank's site, or an Internet portal site. Billers basically invite the portals and banks to come and get the billing information free of charge.
The procedure contrasts with Checkfree's and Transpoint's consolidator model, which requires billers to send customer billing information to their sites. Consumers then tap into the billing information directly at the Transpoint or Checkfree sites, or through their bank's site.
"With the market vying for Checkfree alternatives, creative upstarts like InvoiceLink will be an attractive choice for billers and banks," Avivah Litan, research director of GartnerGroup in Stamford, Conn., wrote in a recent report.
With InvoiceLink, customers control the timing and size of their payments, using technology on which InvoiceLink expects to garner a patent.
"Consumers could set up payment arrangements for a checking account, flip them to a credit card, change the payment amount, or change the payment date," said Alan Neely, president and chief executive officer of InvoiceLink. "Consumers can even direct payments to line items, such as the principal on a mortgage."
But InvoiceLink's software lacks "pay-anyone" capability, which would enable consumers to pay bills from companies that do not present them electronically. Ms. Litan said that is a weakness.
"However, as more bills are presented on the Internet, the need to pay unpresented bills will lessen," she wrote.
