A survey CheckFree Corp. released Tuesday indicates consumers prefer to pay bills online through a single Web site.
The survey also says the majority of those who are currently paying their bills online are going to individual biller sites, but the Norcross, Ga., bill-payment giant predicts that will eventually change.
However, some observers say that biller sites offer features that banking Web sites can't match, and that the biller-direct model may have some staying power.
Judy DeRango Wicks, a CheckFree vice president, said consumers find it inconvenient to pay bills by visiting several different Web sites. "Three is the magic number," she said. "CheckFree has found that once you pay three bills at three sites, then you see the value of paying all your bills at a consolidated site."
Just over half of U.S. online households - 50.7% - are now paying at least one bill online every month, the survey found.
The Marketing Group and Harris Interactive surveyed 2,000 consumers and found 47% of them were satisfied with online banking, but that number increased to 54% for people who used a consolidator, such as a bank, CheckFree, or Time Warner Inc.'s America Online, which uses bill-payment technology from Yodlee Inc.
The study also evaluated people who receive their invoices electronically through a consolidator. Ms. Wicks said 62% of them indicated they were pleased with the service, the highest level of satisfaction in the survey. "These are the happiest people of all."
But Gwenn Bezard, a senior analyst with Celent Communications LLC of Boston, said many consumers go to biller sites in search of specific features the biller may offer on its site, including detailed invoice information.
"The biller's Web site is not just about paying a bill," he said. "There are many things that you can't do at the bank's Web site." For example, customers can dispute charges and change account features at the biller's Web site, but in most cases, all they can do at a bank's site is initiate a payment.
Transactions also post faster at the biller's site, and speed is often an important differentiator, since many consumers wait until the last minute to make their payments, Mr. Bezard said. "If you really want to manage your account, you still have to go to the biller's Web site."
Chris Gardner, the vice president of products and marketing at the Natick, Mass., electronic billing technology vendor Edocs Inc., agreed that the key reason customers flock to biller sites is that consolidator sites are "primarily about payment, whereas biller-direct is about self-service."
But if e-bills are popular with customers, they are also proving to be an area of dispute between billers and consolidators.
Mr. Gardner said billers like having a direct relationship with customers and may be reluctant to provide the detailed data that a consolidator needs to include in an e-bill, because doing so may prompt consumers to switch to a consolidator.
That is exacerbated by the fact that CheckFree charges billers for delivering their invoices, in effect asking billers to pay for losing the customer relationship, Mr. Gardner said. "A business model needs to exist where the billers are incented to participate."
Ms. Wicks (who confirmed that CheckFree considers the billers its customers) said one incentive for billers is that customers who receive electronic bills are generally more satisfied with the entire bill-payment process, which includes the biller and the consolidator.
Mr. Bezard said Edocs presented 280 million electronic bills last year, whereas CheckFree delivered only 54 million the same year.
Ms. Wicks said e-bill volume is increasing; CheckFree delivered 22 million of the electronic invoices in the first quarter.
Mr. Gardner said that the biller-direct and consolidation models are not natural competitors, and that many consumers use both models, depending on how they want to pay each of their bills.
"Both models can coexist," he said. "It's not a case of either-or."
