Electronic Bill Payment

Processor Metavante Corp. has come up with a seemingly natural but rare pairing of two booming payment niches: payroll cards and electronic bill payments. A major provider of both services to financial institutions, Milwaukee-based Metavante this week introduced what it calls Metavante Prepaid Bill Payment. The service makes Internet-based bill …

Bill-payment processor Online Resources Corp. on Thursday reported sharply higher third quarter numbers for transactions, clients, and users as the Chantilly, Va.-based company for the first time included results from rival processor Princeton eCom Corp. Online Resources, which acquired Princeton eCom for $180 million this summer, also said its integration …

August brought some relief in the generally rising onslaught of phishing, with the number of newly detected, unique Web sites hosting attacks dropping dramatically to 10,091 from a record 14,191 in July, according to the latest report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group, which monitors the online fraud. Similarly, the number …

Yodlee Inc., which on Tuesday introduced a mobile version of its online-banking applications, expects the new product to attract between 5 million and 6 million users within the next three years, according to Aashir Shroff, senior product manager for Yodlee Mobile. The service, which allows banks to offer customers the …

Looking to bolster its business with retailers, Atlanta-based CheckFree Corp. this week unveiled its CheckFreePay Link service aimed at helping stores draw more walk-in traffic by offering bill-payment services for local utilities and other billers. CheckFree Pay's existing CheckFreePay network has 11,000 agent sites located in check-cashing outlets, grocery stores, …

Yodlee Inc. announced Tuesday it plans to introduce new technology that could heat up competition in electronic bill payment by letting consumers switch more easily from an online bill-payment program at one bank to that offered by another. The Redwood City, Calif.-based provider of Internet banking software says it will …

Phishing hit record levels in June, according to new numbers released this week by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, though the group cautions that the increase was caused in large part by new data sources that drove up the sample size. The number of unique reports of phishing attacks hit 28,571 …

My Payment Network Inc., a Corte Madera, Calif.-based startup specializing in invoice-based electronic-payment processing for schools and small businesses, says its SchoolPay product could reach between 3,500 and 4,000 schools in the coming year, up from more than 50 at the end of the 2005-06 academic year. At the same …

Seeking to address industry uncertainty about its guidelines on online-banking security, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council this week released a set of clarifications it says addresses “a representation” of questions it has received from banks, technology companies, and banking examiners. This latest document from the FFIEC, an agency that …

More and more consumers now expect their last-minute bill payments to be credited to their accounts with near instantaneous effect. And, increasingly, billers and processors are meeting that expectation?or at least laying plans to. “The trend is toward real-time [bill payment],” says Dave Fortney, senior vice president for electronic presentment …