Aggregation Called Lifeline for EBPP

Slow adoption continues to plague electronic bill payment and presentment, but account aggregation may help get things moving.

The classic problem with EBPP is that billers are not willing to spend money to present bills online until more people are using the service, and people are not inclined to adopt it until more bills are available, according to Richard K. Crone, a vice president at Dove Consulting. But aggregation can address both sides of the problem, he said.

Aggregation lets people consolidate all their bills and deposits, and it gives them one place to receive and pay them, Mr. Crone said last week at Thomson Financial Media’s account aggregation conference in McLean, Va. “Aggregation gives the customer one place to pay but the ability to pay without the middleman,” he said.

Most electronic bill payment and presentment now involves signing up with several billers and with a third-party processor such as CheckFree Corp. But aggregation could let people pay all their bills wherever they aggregate their accounts — including, increasingly, on bank Web sites, he said.

This method would make billers happier, he said. Billers worry about the accuracy of bills and are reluctant to give up control of the way they appear onscreen, Mr. Crone said. Consequently, he said, 98% of all bills presented electronically are presented at the billers’ own Web sites.

Aggregation also gives banks a way to leverage their wholesale operations in electronic billing, Mr. Crone said. Banks get direct access to customers’ bills on the billers’ Web sites. Payments are made on those sites but executed through an automated clearing house payment handled by the wholesale side of the bank.

Gayle Welborne, the director of customer advocacy for e-commerce at First Union Corp., said bill payment is an obvious direction for aggregation to take. “Clearly, as you are aggregating account information the ability to execute transactions such as bill payment is just a natural next phase,” she said.