Low- to medium-volume remittance processors have a new choice for electronic billing and payments processing, and banks have a new competitor in the EBPP business, if not a supplier. Creditron and MyOnlineBill.com are partnering to provide the first product that fully integrates electronic bill payment and presentment with check-based payments processing.
The move is aimed at firms with payment volumes on the lower end of the scale, on the order of a few hundred to a thousand payments per day. Creditron has traditionally sold incoming mail payments processing services, and is expanding into counterpayments. MyOnlineBill.com provides EBPP capabilities, allowing both firms to cross-sell each others' expertise. A division of the 36-year-old Southern California payroll and accounts receivable service firm American Computer Services, MyOnlineBill.com was launched in 2005.
Its EBPP service, called MOB, enables a biller's customers to view, print and pay their bills online, using a credit card, automated clearing house transaction or other payment option. The service interfaces with any legacy billing software, eliminating the need for companies to change their current billing setup. Users of the integrated products can combine into one host their paper-check and the electronic transactions made through MyOnlineBill.com. That's a first for Creditron's customer base of about 200 users mixed among small- to mid-size utilities, municipalities, banks, insurance firms and non-profit organizations.
"By joining together, there's a consolidation of the two payment streams," says Wally Vogel, president of Creditron, who says that allows for a single interface to a firm's accounting system, resulting in less maintenance.
The two firms, whose collaboration began in May, hope the combination will also find takers among clients who are interested in storing payments records for reporting purposes. The product will allow for the delivery of historical invoices, including records of the previous three months of bills. "If I sent in a paper payment, I can get a copy of last month's paper check," Vogel says. "That's especially important as more clients start doing ARC conversions. This is a way they can still refer back and see a version of the check online."
And when billers move from paper to electronic checks, the catalogued payment history makes it easier to "store" accounts from which the bill payments are drawn, creating a default account that can save the time involved in figuring out the user's most recent account. MOB includes features for setting up and managing multiple billing accounts associated with a single user. It also views and prints all mail inserts associated with online bills, e-mails receipts to customers after they make online payments and notifies customers via e-mail of the due date and amount of their payment. Customers have the option of no longer receiving a printed invoice via the U.S. Postal Service.
The combined product could be a competitor to banks hoping to offer ACH or ARC payments to their small business or corporate clients, though the firms are also targeting financial institutions as potential clients. Creditron, for example, has a number of bank clients that use the firm's lock box services, and has a roster of financial clients which includes Tennessee Commerce Bank, Washington Mutual, Irwin Union Bank, National Bank of Canada and Citibank of Canada. Other clients are mostly municipalities, such as the cities of Savannah, GA; Beverly Hills, CA and Duluth, MN.
"I see it that we offer a competitive solution and can work with banks to allow them to offer their customers a biller-direct solution...especially their commercial customers," says Adam Franks, president of MyOnlineBill.com.
