Financial services companies may face a threat from Internet portals for the budding online-billing business, according to new media market researcher Jupiter Communications, New York.
With more than 15 million US households expected to receive their bills online by 2002, banks and other financial sites have a good opportunity to capture the role of aggregator, consolidating and presenting these bills to consumers on one site.
But Internet portals (sites like Yahoo!, where users first enter the Web) have been expanding the services they offer and are beginning to look at “online bill presentment,” the electronic delivery of bills to consumers for easy online payment.
Only a few portals have begun to pursue the online bill presentment opportunity, but according to Jupiter they pose a serious threat to banks. “For banks, online bill presentment offers the last chance to drive recurring contact with customers,” Marc Johnson, Jupiter’s director of digital commerce strategies said in a statement. “This is critical for both customer retention and cross-promotion of other bank products and services.”
Jupiter expects that by the end of the year, the average US online household will be able to receive three to four monthly bills (29%) through online bill presentment. This number will grow to about eight monthly bills (65%) in 2002, with bills from utility and telco companies already being offered online. However, the war over which Web sites will aggregate and present these bills to consumers has yet to be won.
A recent Jupiter/NFO consumer survey shows that 42% of online consumers would prefer to receive bills from their bank’s Web site more than from other market players, such as personal financial management software providers (37%), America Online (13%), portals (7%) and brokers (1%).
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