As a one-time bill payment product manager, I've long appreciated the difficulties of making online payments live up to the hype. It was one of online banking's "dirty secrets" in the 1990s that if you wanted your bill paid quickly, you'd usually be better off whipping out your checkbook and dropping the "ink on dead trees" into the so-called snail mail (see note 1). 

Thankfully, those days are behind us. Thanks to CheckFree, Metavante, Online Resources, MasterCard RPPS, and smaller companies such as iPay Technologies, Billeo Inc., Princeton eCom (now owned by Online Resources), and Yodlee, we have reached the point where most bill payment transactions are fully electronic from consumer initiation to posting by the biller. The paper has finally been wrung from the system, at least on the remittance side. There's still some work to be done on the actual billing statement itself.  

Luckily, we have six of these payment innovators appearing at our upcoming FINOVATE 2007 conference to be held in NYC on Oct. 2, although Yodlee will be showing its online personal finance manager and Online Resources will be DEMOing its virtual collection technology. If you are interested in attending the conference, please register now, since there are only 37 seats remaining. Here's the link.

Billeo Inc.
Billeo is an outside-the-box-thinking online payments facilitator that uses the power of Web-based tools to make it easier for consumers to track and manage all their payments, both at the point-of-sale, and one-time and recurring bills. Blue-chip clients include Visa and Target among others. The Santa Clara, CA-based company won an OBR  Best of the Web in 2005 for its toolbar-based interface. The venture-backed company's innovative streak lands it on the pages of NetBanker quite frequently (see previous coverage here) and we look forward to seeing the next generation of its service at FINOVATE in three weeks.  

CheckFree
CheckFree literally created the market for online bill payment in the United States and has worked tirelessly to help convert what was once a large paper-pushing operation into a finely tuned, almost totally electronic, process. They've been the leader not only in creating a smooth back-office system, but also in smoothing out the rough edges in the payee sign-up process, in the customer interface, and in moving billers towards bill presentment. CheckFree, which closed on its acquisition of platform-provider Corillian just a few months ago, has been swept up by Fiserv in a proposed acquisition pending shareholder approval. Every year the company raises the bar for online bill payments, and I look forward to seeing what they have in store for FINOVATE attendees.

iPay Technologies
We've written about iPay Technologies in Online Banking Report a number of times, but unless you've shopped bill payment providers in the past few years, you may not be familiar with the nimble Elizabethtown, Kentucky-based firm. The privately held, 250-person bill payment specialist now handles payments for more than 1,000 banks and credit unions with a total user base just under 500,000. The company is a full-service provider offering not only bill payments, but also person-to-person payments, interbank transfers, gift-oriented payments, and even old-school telephone bill payment. If you haven't met the management team of iPay yet, you are in for a treat. Dana Bowers and her team are a delight, and I encourage everyone to talk to them during the FINOVATE breakout session.

Metavante
Metavante, wholly owned by Marshall & Ilsley, but on a path to be spun out later this year, is involved in almost every aspect of banking from risk management to loan originations and of course payments and online banking. The company's Products and Services page lists 78 items. I've had the opportunity to participate in its user conference the past three years, and it's mind-boggling to see the breadth and depth of its products displayed in one event. Its latest is a joint venture with leading UK-based mobile-provider Monitise, another FINOVATE presenter (press release here). On Oct. 2, Metavante will be demonstrating its Immediate Payments service, something that customers have long valued. It will be interesting to see how Metavante delivers on this tricky payment capability.

Note:
1. For those of you new to the bill-payment business, the reason snail mail beat online payments was that prior to the turn of the century, the majority of "online" bill payments were actually sent via snail mail, often from remote locations, that took longer to traverse the country than if the consumer had sent it themselves.

This past week, two Web-based personal finance firms, Wesabe and Billeo, have announced feature upgrades (Wesabe release here, Billeo here). One common thread: the ability to easily capture screen images of ecommerce transactions and file them for later reference (note 1).

The time-saving feature was added to Quicken several versions ago, but it's still not yet supported at any financial institution or credit card issuer (see Online Banking Report: Personal Finance Feature for Online Banking here). While it won't change the world, it sure eliminates one of life's little hassles, the decision each time you transact online as to whether you really should "print out this page for future reference" (and where to store the pesky printout if you do.)

How image capture works today:

1. Pay a bill or purchase something online.
2. At completion of the transaction, select "browser snapshot" from Wesabe's drop-down menu or "save & file" from Billeo's toolbar (see screenshots below). 
3. The image of the transaction confirmation screen is stored within the personal finance area and is available for future reference should there be a problem with the transaction; since it's stored as an image file, it can easily be emailed to a disbelieving customer-service agent. Billeo includes a "forward" button in its vault to make it even easier.

How image capture can be enhanced in the future: 

1. It will automate the transaction-reconciliation process, scraping data from the confirmation screen and automatically verifying that the transaction was processed against the user's bank or credit account properly.
2. If not, an email/text alert will notify the end-user of the potential problem.
3. A template could be provided for communicating with the merchant to rectify the problem.
4. The scraped transaction data could also be run against a tagging engine to add very specific transaction tags, e.g., the purchase at Amazon could be split into x dollars for music, y dollars for housewares and z dollars for housewares.

Billeo's Screenshot Capture Feature
To save a screenshot of a payment confirmation, or anything else, users select the shopping button on the Billeo toolbar. That causes a popup to appear (see inset for closeup) where the user selects the bank/card account, enters a transaction description if desired, chooses a page type, selects the correct purchase amount from the values scraped from the screen, and edits the date paid if necessary.

Billeo popup provides users a method of capturing payment details along with the screenshot of the page

Page viewed later in the transaction records
Users can view the transaction and/or image file later in two Billeo areas: My Vault (not shown) and MyBills (below). Mousing over the paperclip launches a thumbnail of the page; clicking on it launches a full-size view of the page.

Wesabe's Screenshot Capture Feature
To save a screenshot, users click on the Wesabe button on the Firefox toolbar. A few seconds later, the screenshot loads (second screenshot below) and users choose whether to "upload to Wesabe" or "save to disk" or both. After the picture has been saved, the user closes the screen. In our test, save-to-disk worked as expected, and it was easy to retrieve the file through Windows Explorer. However, although the upload to Wesabe seemed to work, we couldn't figure out how to access the uploaded screenshots within our Wesabe account.

Closeup of Wesabe tool

 

Full screenshot of page after launching Wesabe screenshot uploader

Note:

1. Billeo has supported page-capture since its 2005 launch, but it was not integrated into the payments-transaction register.

In a distribution deal similar to the Visa.com partnership launched earlier this year, Billeo is now powering biller-direct payments for Target's REDcard (see inset). See previous coverage here.

Billeo received an Online Banking Report Best of the Web award in 2005 for its innovative toolbar-based payment services (see 15 March 2005 post).

How it works
New users start by searching for credit-card-accepting billers via zipcode and company search (see screenshot below).

To schedule a payment and use the other tools, users must first register with Billeo. While the initial biller-search screen runs under Target branding, the sign-up page and subsequent user interfaces do not maintain any Target branding.

Previous Billeo users can skip the registration process and simply sign in to their previous Billeo account.

Last week, Visa USA redesigned its direct bill-pay area using Billeo's technology to power biller search and facilitate direct payments via credit card. It is a major coup for the fledgling direct bill-pay solutions provider Billeo, which earned an Online Banking Report Best of the Web last year for its innovative bill-pay toolbar (OBR 116/117).

The implementation at Visa bears careful review. It wisely uses biller search to engage users (see inset), then prompts them to save their personal biller list using Billeo. After registering, users download and install the toolbar directly into their browser, then input credit card information to facilitate payments. After the initial setup, users can pay select bills directly from the toolbar using the saved credit card and biller info.

Next week, we'll look at Visa's implementation in more detail and share insights from our conversation with Billeo founder, Murali Subbarao. In the meantime, you might want to give it a spin yourself at Visa's bill-pay site, <usa.visa.com/personal/using_visa/pay_bills_with_visa/> (click on screenshot right for a closer look).

Previous articles:

• NetBanker posts on Billeo
• Online Banking Report #85, Grabbing Desktop Mindshare: Private-branded browser extensions can make online services easier to use

-JB

We finally had a chance to talk to Billeo founder and CEO, Raj Lalwani. First last Thursday, then a followup demo today.

I am happy to report the CEO is as impressive as the software.

And it turns out their business model is more B2B than B2C. Billeo will be custom-designing toolbars for banks, credit card issuers, other ecommerce players, such as retailers, travel booking sites, and yes, even billers. They hope to announce a HUGE customer win in the next few weeks. 

We think this application has great promise

We will dissect the company in the next issue of Online Banking Report (available online approximately April 12).

Previous articles can be found here.

-- JB

Since our initial report on Billeo, we've been using the system to pay and view bills. It's a new category of software we'll call toolbar-ware.

The primary user interface is an toolbar located near the top of Internet Explorer. Many of the toolbar functions call-out web pages from the Billeo server, so as you use the program it ends up being a mix of website and toolbar functions. It's actually a bit confusing for the new user.

Part of the reason it's not as intuitive as the Google or eBay toolbar, is that the user must learn an entirely new approach to tracking their billing. Whereas, with eBay and Google, most toolbar users are already well-versed in the nuances of using those popular sites.

We've also discovered their business model, running Google-like ads that run on the right of the page as you use the program. Click on the screenshot above to see the entire page. See left for the advertising section only.

Currently the advertisers running on the Billeo Billboard are ING Direct, The Wall Street Journal, Quicken Loans, and Value Line. The advertisers all stayed the same during our testing.

Bottom line: It's a great program, and we recommend banks consider developing a similar toolbar which also incorporates banking functions, or licensing this one from Billeo. We'll be publishing a complete review of Billeo in OBR #116, published in mid-April.

For more information:

• Previous Financial Marketing Report article on Billeo
• Online Banking Report #85, Grabbing Desktop Mindshare: Private-branded browser extensions can make online services easier to use
• Online Banking Report #115, 116, 117, Epayments v4.0: Profitable online transactions

--JB

Editor's Note: Billeo was named "OBR Best of the Web" in the second part of its series on E-Payments (OBR 119) published in June 2005. 

Just when you thought the banks were gaining an upper hand in the electronic bill payment battle, up pops a newcomer with a fresh approach. Take a moment to check out Billeo. An odd name, but so is iPod, and it seems to be working pretty well.

We haven't used it yet, so these comments are preliminary, but "on paper" this company and its approach appear to be winners. (One caveat: the business model is unknown, and the privacy policy is a bit ambiguous when it comes to the issue of adware. We'll keep you posted on what we find out.)

Billeo is a free toolbar-resident application that plays "virtual assistant," enabling more convenient and controlled direct bill payment at vendor sites. The toolbar also serves as an e-wallet simplifying online point-of-sale transactions.

Analysis
The toolbar contains several unique features, one of which is extremely impressive, the ability to save screen captures of transaction receipts. The application also includes payment reminders, a payment register, and a personal "bill payment" email address for users.

There are several familiar names associated with the startup. Nancy Langer, a former exec at Metavante, is the president. The advisory board includes Eric Dunn, formerly with Intuit, Shankar Srinivasan co-founder of Cyberbills, and Scott Loftesness of Glenbrook Partners.

We'll dissect the new service in Part 2 of our upcoming Electronic Payments Report in Online Banking Report.

--JB

Editor's Note: Billeo was named "OBR Best of the Web" in the second part of its series on E-Payments (OBR 119) published in June 2005.