| By Jim Bruene on February 3, 2011 7:36 PM | Comments (4) |
Striata and AcceptEmail delivered two of my favorite demos this week at FinovateEurope. Both are working on ways to help move consumers away from antiquated and wasteful (but easy to use) paper billing and into the 21st century with interactive PDF versions delivered via email (also see ActivePath's FinovateFall 2010 demo video).
Unlike certain personal finance products which have more intangible benefits, ebilling stands to drive tens of $ billions of wasted expense out of the system while at the same time making consumers' lives simpler. That's worth paying attention to.
And I like the Striata/AcceptEmail/Activepath approach. Migrate consumers to an interactive email bill which is far superior to its paper ancestor and is aggregated within a familiar interface, the email client (see note 1). This is the most likely method of gaining mass adoption.
Ebilling hubs
But email inboxes are notoriously messy and over-crowded making it easy to overlook emailed bills (note 2). So I really like the idea of an ebilling hub, a place where all my bills are stored so I can review the history, communicate with billers, and make sure everything was paid on time (note 3).
That's why I've been following the developments at Doxo; Volly from Pitney Bowes; and Zumbox, which all have very different ideas on how to pull this off. But one thing they'll all need is payment capabilities. It's not enough to just view a stack of ebills, you have to be able to complete the task with payment.
So it was good to see Doxo add payments to its ebilling hub this week. The Seattle startup, which moved into public beta late last year (see previous post), now allows users to pay any bill received into the hub (currently only Sprint and KCPL).
Users press the Pay button displayed by the bill in the "to do" section (see first screenshot). A popup screen is used to schedule the payment.
Bottom line: There's plenty of opportunity here for multiple approaches. Email bills are a pretty safe bet, while the ebill hub is a longer shot. But ultimately, we believe there's a place for both models.
Doxo's ebilling hub now includes a Pay button (3 Feb. 2011)
Popup payment-scheduling screen
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Notes:
1. See our recent reports: Paperless Billing and Banking and Email Banking: Revitalizing the Channel.
2. Also at FinovateEurope, Yodlee demoed a clever solution to help organize bills. It's new app will automatically search your hard drive to find downloaded bills and statements and automatically upload them into the Yodlee PFM where they can be aggregated and stored in the cloud.
3. You can do this with individual billers by logging into their sites, but that is a time-consuming chore best avoided.
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Hi Jim,
Thanks for the mention above. Striata and Acceptemail both believe that the inbox is the natural and perfect consolidator for all your bills - what we are seeing is the use of rules within Outlook to automatically move the incoming bills to a bill folder or the customer actually having a designated email account for bills (e.g. a gmail address where the bills are stored forever).
Striata does the Interactive PDF bills and Acceptemail does colour coded payment tokens on the face of the bills - we are discussing ways of working together into the future.
I'd like to second your views in the article above - an eBilling HUB is appropriate for a certain % of customers and hence Striata are working with various hubs (including Yodlee mentioned above) to automatically deliver bills into the hub via email. Customers provide a "HUB" email address for their bills if that is their preference.
I think the way to drive paperless adoption is to provide customer choice, but have email as the default channel for new customers.
regards
Michael Wright
CEO - Striata
What would drive paperless adoption for me is a doxo like approach, but instead of partnering up with the biller one at a time, we need a mint/yodlee approach that will in combination partner or scrape a site to get relevent statements. In fact, I don't know why Yodlee isn't already offering this, since they have the ability already to scrape the transactions, why not extend it to get the statements. I know there would still be work to get statements from smaller companies/services that don't offer transactions and hence don't have a site that Yodlee could scrape, but the majority of my statements are from transaction based companies and are already being tracked in Mint. The ability to access statements from the majority of your billers, just as Mint does for your transactions, would make Doxo actually useful.
What was the adoption rate of Mint to hit 1 million users and get bought by Quicken? Doxo has the front end to match Mint, now they just need the back-end scraper and then they will be relevant.
@Jason
I think you are right and that's how it's likely to play out. I think Doxo wants to have one-on-one relationships with the billers (who are paying the freight here)...but i don't see how bill presentment reaches critical without some scraping, at least to get it off the ground.
Searching internet for options ala Doxo, Zumbox, Manilla, etc. but also want transactions & balance capabilites of Yodlee. Wish Yodlee had statements, still need to go to each account website, login & download. Ebillers seem to only look at getting bills/stmts and ability to make payments, but without ability to see transactions for banks, credit cards, etc. it's has limited usefulness for me beyond just providing bill/stmt consolidation. Experience over time also shows many accounts need updating because providers change their protocol & as user I may change password. A lot of work to manage all my login information & maintain at account site & these services.