As with Web portal, bill presentment is a term that has outlived its usefulness. It’s a throwback to the days when analysts expected bills to be presented by third parties on behalf of the end biller. The only debate was whether “thick client” would beat out the “thin client.”¹

Now we know from actual results that consumers are flocking to billing Web sites. Third-party presentment systems are all but dead. Industry leader, Checkfree, distributed only 6 million  (0.04%) of the country’s 15 billion bills in 2001.

The exceptions are user-controlled aggregation systems such as Yodlee, uMonitor, and TekNowledge², which are poised for rapid growth.

A new term has surfaced recently³ that we think is much better at describing what consumers are actually doing: (online) account management. It sounds like a good thing; what spouse wouldn’t want to explain they were online “managing their accounts.”

¹For the record, we never joined the “thick vs. thin” debate; expecting direct models to eventually predominate

²TekNowledge was recently selected to power FiServ’s aggregation system

³We first saw it used by Gartner Group