Billpay: After 20 Years as a Loss Leader, Check/PageOnce Shows Path to Profitability
In the United States, banks have squandered $10+ billion providing free billpay during the past 12 years. But that's about to change, if the model from Palo Alto-based Check (formerly PageOnce) takes hold. First, a history lesson for anyone born after 1980. For the first few years of the online era (mid-1990s), "electronic bill payment" was offered by banks and credit unions with monthly fees of $5 or $6. That made it roughly breakeven, at least if you didn't count the sometimes heavy burden on customer service to solve problems caused by the very analog back-end of the so-called "electronic" service. But then in 2002, Bank of America ruined even that by offering free billpay and advertising it widely on television (note 1). It even released internal data purporting to prove that what the bank gave up in fee income was more than compensated by intangibles such as higher deposit…
