Nacha, the electronic payments association, is testing an online bill presentment service that runs on the automated clearing house network.
The Herndon, Va., trade group announced the yearlong test Monday, involving three banks and one biller, Verizon Communications Inc. in New York.
Verizon's bank, which Nacha would not name, transmits bill summary information to two receiving banks, Wells Fargo & Co. in San Francisco and Dollar Bank in Pittsburgh, which can present the data to customers on their online bill payment sites.
Elliott C. McEntee, the Herndon, Va., association's president and chief executive, said the service, called Electronic Billing Information Delivery Service, or Ebids, is easy for banks to install and has more potential users than other e-bill delivery services.
"The ACH network has far greater reach to billers than any other network in the country," Mr. McEntee said. "Virtually every financial institution in the country — 15,000 of them — participate[s] on the ACH network, so 15,000 of those institutions could offer this service to their customers, which would increase the reach that the biller has to present bills electronically."
Billers' banks do not need to make change in their payments systems, as long as they can accept ACH files, but banks that want to receive the information on behalf of consumers must install the software to do so.
Nacha said it is working with the financial technology vendors Fidelity National Information Services Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla., and PM Systems Corp. in Chapin, S.C., to incorporate the Ebids software into their online banking applications.
Mr. McEntee said that Nacha and the participating banks expect billers to pay their banks a fee to deliver the bills electronically; a portion of the fee is to be shared with the consumers' banks as an incentive to install the required software.
Ebids bills contain only summary invoice information, but the consumer can be redirected from a bank's bill-pay site to a secure page on the biller's site to view details before paying. The consumer would not have to log in separately at the biller's site to access the data.
Rob Unger, Nacha's senior director of e-billing and payment, said that the Ebids software can be integrated with other e-bill presentment systems.
"It's just a channel for sending the information," he said. "The consumer doesn't know if the biller's an Ebids biller or another biller."
He likened this to a company working with multiple package-shipping courier companies — as long as the package reaches its destination, the recipient may not care how it got there.
Mr. McEntee said that some other bill payment and e-bill providers use proprietary technology but that Ebids was built using an open standard "so any biller could participate through any third party, through any bank."
