The FINANCIAL — Paying bills is everyone’s least favorite chore – it requires balancing when bills are due, flexing memory muscles when it comes to remembering passwords and signing in and out of different billing sites.
Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange, a new digital solution will make it easier for consumers to view, manage and pay telecom, utility, rent, credit card, mortgage and other personal bills without having to set up accounts with different billers or remember multiple passwords and dates for payments each month.
Offered through banks and credit unions, this technology will enable consumers to use their mobile banking app to easily set up all billers, receive notifications when a bill is due, see bill details, and manage multiple bills in one place including specifying when and how much to pay.
Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange will link to The Clearing House’s (TCH’S) real-time payments infrastructure, which was built with technology from Vocalink, a Mastercard company. This will enable consumers to pay their bills instantly from their bank accounts – in a matter of seconds versus days – reducing the delay between when the payment is made and when it is reflected in the consumer’s balance.
Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange, will bring speed, transparency and efficiency to bill payments, including several benefits to billers such as reduction of reconciliation costs achieved by delivering remittance details in bulk or alongside payments, and decrease in costs associated with mailing paper bills and processing paper checks. With Bill Pay Exchange, FIS will be able to deliver an enhanced bill pay experience to consumers at banks, financial institutions, and credit unions.
While partnerships with banks are critical to bringing this solution to life, a vast and healthy network of billing partners will drive adoption. Over the last 30 years, Mastercard has built the largest network of 135,000 billers to support traditional bank bill pay, and the company plans to broaden biller coverage even further. ACI Worldwide, Aliaswire, Inlet and Transactis have also signed on to develop the Bill Pay Exchange. These partners will facilitate real-time payment messaging and confirmation. In addition, billing information provided by them will enable banks to auto-suggest billers to their customers so they don’t have to manually add the businesses to whom they make regular payments.
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