The electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP) headlines in 2006 will be mostly about vendors offering integrated EBPP platforms, spawning in turn a clutch of M&A stories, says Ron Averette, Princeton eCom Inc.’s ceo. Expect to see the number of payments players this year dwindle.

“You’ll continue to see core processors looking to add bill pay as an ancillary capability to their other product offerings,” he says. Averette cited Fiserv’s July 2005 acquisition of BillMatrix for $350 million as an example of a big payments shop, interested in having a bill payment capability, using an acquisition as the foundation of an integrated family of EBPP products. In the coming year, he says, all of Fiserv’s competitors will be jumping into the pond.

These companies are trying to create a unified package they can sell to both billers and, especially, to banks, which have especially bought into the idea that free bill payment on their website means the most productive platform for cross-selling other products to their customers.

Any of those acquisitions will be pretty small, thinks Avenette. That could even include Fidelity National Financial Corp. which for the past three years has typically been buying larger firms. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Fidelity reach down into some of the smaller companies to get some bill pay capabilities,” he says. The best way to handicap which companies could be snapped up: Look at firms with significant venture capital investment.

Billers, having begun accepting credit and debit card payments in 2005, will become more receptive this year to various electronic payment vehicles. “Whether it’s one-time pay, recurring auto-debit, convenience pay or bill presentment, there will be much broader focus on those capabilities,” he says, especially among the many billers who have begun automating their accounts receivable departments. That phenomenon in turn has spelled staff cutbacks at those billers, meaning they can’t pick and choose particular payment methods anymore, and don’t care–as long as the money goes through their systems.

Combined with the push from banks to minimize paper, more and more checks are being squeezed out of the payments system. GMAC Mortgage, says Averette, recently told him that checks only represent 15 percent to 20 percent of their monthly payments today as the result of a concerted push for electronic bill presentment, one-time pay, and check truncation in the back office. “Converting 80 percent to 85 percent of your payments from paper—that’s a staggering amount,” he says.

The two most important trends for this year: EBPP gone mainstream and expedited payments. Shopping on the Web has turned making payments online into a commonplace, says Avenette, and paying a utility bill is nothing, once you’ve bought $500 in Christmas presents from L.L. Bean’s website. As a result, EBPP is vanishing into the overall Internet experience, in the process turning companies like Princeton eCom into utilities. And the same-day, expedited-payments idea will mean even more payments volume going via the ACH channel. (Contact: Ron Averette, Princeton eCom Inc., 609-606-3590)