Tio Networks, which today announced the planned launch of a mobile bill-payment platform, estimates it will generate 20% of its revenue from the service by 2011, according to the Burnaby, British Columbia-based expedited bill-payment processor.
Tio plans to launch the application with a biller client later this month or early in the second quarter, says Chris Ericksen, Tio senior vice president of business development.
With the emergence of online banking and payments, “a natural next step is for people to do more transactions through their mobile devices,” he says. “It’s not a stretch for customers to move from online banking on a [personal computer] and then utilize the same functions for their mobile devices.”
Tio’s mobile bill-payment system will enable consumers to pay utility, cable and other types of reoccurring bills from companies with which Tio works using their smartphones, such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone and certain devices with the Android operating system.
Consumers will learn about the service through information on the billers’ Web sites, and they can download the application at Apple’s online application store or the Android app store, says Ericksen. The application is free for consumers to download, but billers may choose to charge consumers that pay their bills using mobile devices, he says.
Once consumers download the application, they then will be able to search for and select the participating biller they want to pay using their account details. The application saves the biller and account information for future use.
Consumers also enter their preferred payment methods. Credit and signature-debit cards are the only options currently available on the system, but Tio eventually intends to add automated clearinghouse debit payments and potentially alternative-payment methods, such as PayPal Inc., says Ericksen.
Tio uses tokenization to increase the safety of the card data. Tokenization replaces actual account number information with unique identifiers.
Consumers enter a four-digit PIN and a user name when logging in to the application and when approving bill payments, says Ericksen.
