Broadridge, Pitney Bowes Form Paperless Banking Joint Venture

Pitney Bowes and Broadridge Financial Solutions have formed a paperless banking joint venture called Inlet. The two companies plan to invest $15 million to $20 million in the venture.

The Inlet platform is designed to enable financial services companies to distribute bank statements, bills and other documents to consumers for review and storage through online banking channels they already use, the co-owners said in a press release.

Broadridge, a technology provider that helps process more than $5 trillion in fixed income and equity trades per day for banks and other financial institutions in 13 countries in North America, and Pitney Bowes, which provides data analytics and delivery technology, are cooperating to create a multifunctional platform financial firms can use to create a secure, customizable space to store documents and build relationships with customers.

Inlet's new interactive technology platform aims to make it easier for companies to make financial information and important documents "from hundreds of providers," accessible for customers in just a few clicks, according to the release. For example, customers will receive invoices and view marketing materials that would have otherwise been sent via mail, and secure archiving of documents for up to seven years.

The platform will be delivered through the Amazon Web Services cloud-based infrastructure. Inlet also is working with ID DataWeb, whose technology implements the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace principles, the company said.

Starting in 2015, iPay Solutions from ProfitStars, a division of Jack Henry & Associates, will gradually roll out the Inlet technology to the more than 4,000 financial institutions to which it provides bill payment services.

Initially consumers will have the option to view full invoices from more than 170 billers. During the first phase of the launch, the Inlet platform will flow content through FileThis, a service that fetches bills and bank statements from companies and delivers to consumers via channels such as iPay; and Pitney Bowes' Mailstream on Demand solution for small-to-medium sized billers.

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