In September, Peter Hazelhurst, senior vice-president of product
development for Yodlee, the US payments solutions provider, told
EPI that in the payments processing market “we are finding a great
deal of receptivity, and we are moving quickly to capture market
share”. In a significant development to this strategy, global money
transfer services provider Western Union has opted to partner with
Yodlee to offer payment services to online bill-paying users.

The new service is hosted on Yodlee’s BillPay PayItAll platform
launched in September, and according to the partners, is the first
capable of linking financial institutions’ online bill-payment
services directly to Western Union’s billers. In 2006, Western
Union executed 249 million consumer-to-business transactions.

Yodlee’s platform also enables same-day and next-day online bill
payments, improving on current payment methods that can take
several days and often entail the issue of paper cheques to
merchants by consumers’ financial institutions. BillPay PayItAll
lets consumers make bill payments from a bank account or with
credit or debit cards.

“We see this as a tremendous opportunity to improve the online
banking and bill-pay experience for consumers and small businesses
while, at the same time, enabling our financial institution
customers to generate significant new revenue,” said Anil Arora,
Yodlee’s CEO. “The potential to expedite payments to thousands of
billers satisfies a growing consumer and financial institution
demand.”

Three other major US financial institutions are implementing Yodlee
BillPay.