Direct Route To E-PaymentDirect Route To E-Payment

An offering from financial-services software vendor Yodlee Inc. will provide a standardized interface for connecting to "biller-direct" Web sites of nearly 2,500 lenders, credit-card, and mortgage companies, as well as nonfinancial billers such as mobile-phone, cable-TV, and long-distance companies. The service, dubbed BillDirect, is being tested at one of the vendor's large clients. It's based on an upcoming upgrade of Yodlee's account-aggregation software that's focused on helping users manage their billing.

Biller-direct electronic bill presentment and payment sites offer a few things that banks don't. For one, billers often present the most recent transactions before they appear on a monthly statement. By making that information available, Yodlee can offer customized alerts that notify customers when they're about to miss a credit-card payment.

Billers won't mind having third parties aggregate their information, according to Yodlee, because they'll receive benefits in return. Among them: Yodlee clients will be able to make use of the increased pool of aggregated information. Yodlee has 150 clients, including Bank of America, Citibank, and Mer-rill Lynch, and major portals, including America Online, MSN, and Yahoo.

Possible applications include marketing cus-tom-ized products to customers with specific needs, such as making frequent calls to a particular country. While such uses would have to comply with applicable privacy and credit-reporting laws, the data is there for the picking. "Technically, they have access to all of it," says Hill Ferguson, general manager for electronic bill presentment and payment services at Yodlee.

Some competition may come from a pilot program run by the Electronic Payments Association, which operates the interbank network used for transfers such as direct deposits. It will attempt to mitigate some of the information gaps on the billing sites of banks that lack a data feed to a given service provider. Such sites can't provide instant feed-back of received payments, but the Electronic Pay-ments Association's Electronic Billing Information Delivery Service will promote a secure, standards-based network for exchanging payment and remittance information between banks and billers.