(August 25, 2009) It’s now official: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has become a major distributor of walk-in electronic bill-payment services. Processor Fiserv Inc. announced that 3,755 U.S. Wal-Mart locations now offer standard and next-day bill payments from Fiserv’s CheckFreePay service. The service enables customers to pay 2,500 utility, credit card, phone, insurance, and other billers by coming to the MoneyCenter locations within Wal-Mart Supercenters, Neighborhood Markets, and regular stores. Bill-pay thus gives Wal-Mart yet another financial service with which to attract consumers, especially those that don’t use banks or use them minimally.

The buildup to Tuesday’s announcement, which also included a press release from Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart, actually began about two years ago when Fiserv first started offering bill-pay in some Wal-Mart stores. “We were offering the service in most of their MoneyCenters over the past year,” Paul Harrison, senior vice president and general manager of Walk-In Solutions at Brookfield, Wis.-based Fiserv, tells Digital Transactions News. But, in keeping with its frequent practice with other services, Wal-Mart didn’t want to announce the bill-pay offering until it was available in all of its U.S. stores, he says.

Standard payments to be delivered within three business days cost 88 cents, while next-day delivery costs $1.88. Wal-Mart will continue to offer expedited, or same-day delivery, bill-pay services from MoneyGram International Inc. for $4.50 and up.

The pricing makes Wal-Mart’s bill-pay offerings highly competitive and complements other financial services the retailer offers such as the reloadable prepaid card it introduced about two years ago, says Red Gillen, senior analyst with Boston-based Celent LLC. “The overall pricing has been attractive to the un/underbanked population,” Gillen tells Digital Transactions News by e-mail. “Wal-Mart knows that a good portion of its customers fall within this population and [has] thus offered another service to attract them into Wal-Mart stores.”

Citing a July study of 401 consumers by Aite Group LLC that it commissioned, Wal-Mart claimed it could cut customers’ bill-pay costs in half versus average costs from third-party providers, saving Americans as much as $100 million annually. The study also says more than 21 million households pay at last one bill in person each month.

Fiserv’s Harrison wouldn’t give transaction totals so far or predict future volumes, but he expects Wal-Mart will generate plenty of new business for CheckFreePay. “I can tell you we are pleased with the numbers,” he says, noting that “millions of people” go to Wal-Mart stores every week.

Harrison says Wal-Mart did “a very extensive review” of bill-pay providers before settling on Fiserv. Fiserv, which bought leading bill-pay processor CheckFree Corp. in 2007 for $4.4 billon, clearly had one edge: more biller relationships than anyone else, he says. A Wal-Mart spokesperson essentially confirmed that view, saying by e-mail that “CheckFreePay is a leader in the walk-in bill payment market, enabling consumers to pay more than 2,500 bills at more than 16,000 agent sites nationwide.”

The Wal-Mart spokesperson says the company is telling customers about the service mainly by signs in stores.