Facilitas Inc. has refurbished its Bankswitcher.com Web site to make it easier for people who have switched banks to update their bill-payment settings.
The New York vendor said that the new version of its site, which went live this week, was designed to appeal to heavy users of automatic payments.
"Trying to recall everything that goes on electronically is hard," said Robert Rubin, Facilitas' founder and chief executive. "We spent two years figuring out how to try to make it easier to switch."
Facilitas uses the data from the Open Financial Exchange files that banks provide to users of personal financial management software. Those filed are used to determine how payments should be set up, and the Bankswitcher site uses them to determine which payments are sent through a bank's online system and are sent by other means, such as automatic debits initiated by billers.
The site then can provide the user with the information necessary to switch those other debits, Mr. Rubin said. "We don't change anything for the user. … What our system does is it untangles everything."
Jennifer Roth, a senior analyst with the global payments practice at TowerGroup Inc., a Needham, Mass., independent research firm owned by MasterCard Inc., said Facilitas is trying to "basically simplify the switching process."
Electronic payments are "fairly sticky," she said. "That is one of the things that consumers complain about." A payment switch kit like Bankswitcher.com's is "not something that's a No. 1 requirement" when switching banks, but it "will help."
