Allstate Corp., the nation's largest publicly held personal lines insurer, has begun offering online bill presentment through banks' online bill-payment sites, signaling a growing willingness by billers to distribute statements through external partners.
The CheckFree unit of Fiserv Inc. announced Thursday that Allstate, a Northbrook, Ill., company, would make monthly statements available through the 3,000 electronic billing and payment Web sites powered by CheckFree.
Cathy Lazaroff, Allstate's vice president of customer experience and innovation, said economic efficiency and ecological sensitivity prompted the move.
"CheckFree makes it easier to do business with Allstate and easy for our customers to do something good for the environment," she said in a press release.
Allstate already offers bill presentment on its own Web site.
CheckFree — an Atlanta payments company that was bought this week by Fiserv, a Brookfield, Wis., financial technology company, in a $4.4 billion deal — said it is gaining ground in online presentment. Jardon Bouska, an executive vice president at CheckFree and the general manager of its electronic biller services unit, said the company has been adding billers in the credit card, telephone, and cable television markets.
Billers that send statements through CheckFree, as well as posting them to their own Web sites, include American Express Co., Citigroup Inc., and Verizon Communications Inc., Mr. Bouska said. "Allstate is the first big one in the insurance space."
Presentment has a long way to go to catch up with online bill payment, but it is growing at a faster rate. In its last earnings statement, in October, CheckFree reported it had processed 351.6 million transactions in the quarter ended Sept. 30, for 12.8% growth from a year earlier.
By contrast the company said it had presented 63.9 million bills to consumers during that period, but the growth rate was nearly twice as fast, at 23.4%.
Mr. Bouska said billers have incentives to offer electronic bills wherever customers want to receive them. "The billers implement this not only for customer convenience but [also] to save themselves money," he said.
Presenting a statement electronically saves on printing and mailing and on payment handling, he said. "The other thing they save is customer-care costs," he said, because online bill-payment is a self-service medium, reducing both employee expense and exception processing.
More than 60% of U.S. companies' monthly statements are now available for presentment, mostly from the largest billers, Mr. Bouska said. "The growth is around consumer adoption," he said.
Green marketing campaigns are helping. Consolidated Edison Inc., the New York electric utility, saw 70% growth in presentment after a green marketing campaign, Mr. Bouska said.
Jennifer Roth, a senior analyst at TowerGroup in Needham, Mass., an independent research firm owned by MasterCard Inc., said green marketing is proving an effective way to drive adoption,
"It's becoming more of a reason for everybody to be involved in looking for ways to reduce our impact on the environment," she said.
The online payment market today is about evenly divided between consolidated sites, such as those operated by banks, and biller-direct sites, she added.
Billers value the time that people spend on their Web sites and fear that consolidators will deprive them of the chance to cross-sell to those customers. But such concerns, Ms. Roth said, are unwarranted.
"They're going to come back there anyway" for other customer-service issues, such as checking the number of minutes remaining on their monthly cell phone plan, she said.
Cost savings should be billers' central concern, Ms. Roth said. "Replacing paper is important, whether it's a biller-direct site or a consolidator site."
