Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
AcceptEmail Inc., an Amsterdam-based bill-payment company, is bringing its service to the United States, and has hired a former bill-payment executive to head its North American efforts.
Demand for faster payments and the ability to make mobile bill payments aids AcceptEmail’s North American push, says Peter Kwakernaak, chief executive of the 8-year-old AcceptEmail. Consumers want ease of use and billers want speedier payments.
AcceptEmail enables billers to send bills to consumers that make it easier to pay directly from emails. The service works like this. A consumer receives an AcceptEmail email message that contains the billing information. Atop the email is a banner containing the payment information. The consumer clicks the banner to verify the biller and the amount. After clicking the pay button, a landing page provided by the biller appears for the consumer to authorize the payment.
Once the payment is accepted, the banner in the original email turns green to indicate success. Both the consumer and the biller see the same information, and know that the bill has been successfully paid, says Kwakernaak.
AcceptEmail functions across multiple device types, including mobile and desktop computers, he says. For mobile devices, AcceptEmail uses responsive design to format the email so it is easy to use on smaller screens. The landing page for the payment also is mobile optimized.
A challenge for AcceptEmail will be getting billers to use the service. That’s where Ron Averett, AcceptEmail president and chief executive of its North American operations, can help. Averett formerly headed Princeton eCom Corp., an online bill-payment company, that became part of Online Resources Corp. in 2006. Online Resources in turn was bought in 2013 by ACI Worldwide Inc.
Averett’s job is to create the infrastructure, staffing, and scale necessary to build AcceptEmail’s North American business. Averett says he’ll expand the company’s contact list among billers, attend conferences to find new clients, and oversee the marketing.
He’ll have his work cut out. “The challenge for new entrants is biller adoption,” David Albertazzi, senior analyst at research firm Aite Group LLC, tells Digital Transactions News. “There are lots of nuts and bolts and it takes time to gain adoption.”
Some of the work, even after persuading billers to use the service, involves getting access to the bill data so it can be presented in the emails. Consumers want to see all of the bill detail, preferring not to have to switch to a Web site from email, he says. “It’s challenging when they need to present content,” Albertazzi says of third-party bill-payment companies.
Averett says that will be fairly easy for AcceptEmail to do because the software AcceptEmail created eases the work for billers.
AcceptEmail also will contend with consumer behavior, Albertazzi says. “Boomers and seniors tend to put more trust in the financial institutions,” he says, meaning they may be more likely to use a bank’s bill-pay service. But banks are struggling to get younger consumers, and that’s the group that might find AcceptEmail appealing, he says. “Consumer education will be key to their success and establishing a strong security component.”
