Yodlee Takes Its Web-Based Approach Beyond Online Bill Payment

On the heels of an online-bill payment product it introduced last week that allows consumers to pay with credit cards, Yodlee Inc. on Tuesday introduced a Web-based tool that competes with personal-finance software and lets consumers pay bills and transfer funds. “We're capitalizing on the convergence between online banking and bill payment,” says Joseph Polverari, senior vice president of strategy and development at the Redwood City, Calif.-based Internet banking-software company. Yodlee, whose systems serve nearly 7 million users on behalf of more than 100 financial-services companies, says it will begin marketing the new product, called MoneyCenter, to consumers next month. It will be private-labeled by banks and other financial-services companies. Polverari says “a good metric for success” for MoneyCenter will be the signing of 10 financial institutions for one or more of its modules. Like Intuit Inc.'s Quicken and competing personal financial-management products, MoneyCenter helps consumers track expenses, generates reports, keeps a check register, and helps create household budgets. Unlike these software packages, however, MoneyCenter relies on 7-year-old Yodlee technology that acts as a proxy for consumers, using their user names and passwords to sign into online accounts to gather account and transaction information and present and pay bills. “Everyone else out there has built proprietary payment networks,” says Polverari. “What Yodlee does is leverage the Internet.” Yodlee's data and payment engines link to some 8,000 data sources within banks, billers, and other online entities. In this way, the new product can automatically fill in transaction and other financial information for consumers, relieving them of the need to enter data. The product's bill-payment module will include a capability for expedited (or same-day) payments as well as credit card payment, a feature seldom offered by banks' online bill-payment services, which typically use automated clearing house transfers. Yodlee hopes this will appeal to consumers by allowing them to compile rewards points and to banks, most of which have dropped fees for online bill pay, by giving them revenue from interchange. “Now bill pay is a moneymaker for the first time,” says Polverari. Pricing to financial institutions for MoneyCenter was not available from Yodlee.