Commerce Bancorp Inc. of Cherry Hill, N.J., says bill payment through its Web site is way up following an overhaul of the site that began a year and a half ago.
About 300,000 households - more than 35% of Commerce's retail account base - are online and about 25% of its online banking households use the bill payment feature, said Jack R. Allison 4th, the $19.3 billion-asset bank holding company's vice president of systems development . "We struggled to break 14% or 15% before," he said.
Previously, "the bill payment process was too hard," Mr. Allison said in an interview Monday. "We tried to drive it to its most simple, elegant form" in the overhaul.
Commerce also eliminated a $5 monthly bill-payment fee and went to a "pay anyone" model instead of having customers choose from a list of participating billers.
A user "could actually pay the lawn guy and maybe a couple other recurring checks," Mr. Allison said. "I think the combination of the three things really took it over the top."
Commerce is using the Corillian Voyager online banking software from Corillian Corp. of Portland, Ore.; in April it completed an 18-month conversion of its subsidiary banks to Voyager.
Commerce has offered Web banking services since 1995, Mr. Allison said, starting with a product from CFI ProServices. That product used a direct-dial connection to the bank, and Commerce added Internet capabilities in the late 1990s, when e-banking started to gain popularity.
After CFI's corporate successor, Concentrex Inc., agreed in mid-2000 to a buyout by John H. Harland Co., Commerce looked elsewhere for e-banking technology.
"We had pent-up demand for feature functionality for about two and a half years," Mr. Allison said.
One thing Commerce found out in the first stages of its e-banking makeover was that while users of personal finance software such as Quicken and Microsoft Money represented a small but loyal group, users of the QuickBooks small-business accounting package were a substantial market, with more reliance on the software.
"We're hoping to capture that synergy," Mr. Allison said. Now Commerce tends to put its small-business customers in with retail accounts and is mulling the viability of providing entrepreneurs with cash management products such as automated clearing house payments for direct deposit of payroll or wire transfers to suppliers.
"Do we really need to craft an intermediate product" to serve small businesses? Mr. Allison said. "In the next 30 days we'll have a much better feel for that. There seems to be a very strong affinity for the QuickBooks product."
