Citigroup is one of the first large banks to extend Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange to its corporate and consumer customers through its partnership with billing technology firm Aliaswire.
The move comes after Aliaswire, a longtime Citi partner, recently integrated its DirectBiller platform—which supports 800 billers including utilities and insurance companies—with Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange.
Citi can now offer its institutional clients a way to broadly distribute digital bills by email, text and mobile devices with the option to collect bill payments through multiple channels.
“We’ve achieved a milestone by connecting billers across the country, banks and consumers through Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange, significantly expanding options for all parties to send, track and pay bills,” Jed Rice, Aliaswire’s CEO, said in an interview.
Digital payment presentment is still only at 60% market penetration in the U.S., but momentum is building as more billers add digital bill-presentment capabilities so end users can choose how they access bills and pay via virtually any method, according to Rice.
“We’re seeing a big transformation as digital technology enables banks to play a bigger role in helping their biller partners expand the way bills are presented to end users, making it much faster and more efficient,” Rice said.
Citi for several years has offered its corporate customers Aliaswire’s BillerDirect platform on a white-label basis to its corporate customers through Citi’s Present and Pay solution, according to Rice.
Aliaswire, of Burlington, Massachusetts, converts biller content into a digital format, adds interactive functionality and then organizes and manages it for users. Now Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange acts as a hub to widely distribute that billing data, making it available for various endpoints such as online banking portals or potentially third-party services like Square or PayPal, Rice said.
“We continue to invest in Citi Present and Pay to enable our institutional clients to create a better bill-pay experience for their customers, and to help remove costly inefficiencies for billers,” Anupam Sinha, global head of domestic payments and receivables for Citi’s treasury and trade solutions, said in a press release.
