HN Explorer

Ask HN: A better way to pay bills?

7 points by mattmiller ↗ HN
Hi all,

I pay my bills online, but it is still kinda obnoxious logging into a dozen accounts every month and making the payment. Is there a website that consolidates this? I did some googling, but I didn't find a great answer. This seems like such a good idea that I can't believe that nobody has made this yet.

Thanks

6 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 23.7 ms ] thread
spooneybarger
I do it via my bank account. For anything that has almost any 'size', it is available via that account. You should be able to consolidate most via the bill pay option your bank provides.
nfriedly
Ditto. Fidelity brokerage account + "mysmart cash" checking account.
Quasimofo
Australia has BPAY which works great for me.

From my online banking site I have all of my utility bills appear automatically and I can add any other bills that are still snail-mailed to me. (I have about 20 merchants listed - everything from medical insurance to toll road operators). Payments can be scheduled or manual.

In the past 3 years I think the only "mundane" bill that I haven't been able to BPAY was perhaps a parking fine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPAY

gcheong
I have most of my bills paid through each service provider's (gas, electric, phone/internet, cable) automatic bill pay. Rent is paid by check through my bank's bill pay feature each month. With this setup, basically the only bill I log in to pay each month is my credit card.
cameldrv
I use Paytrust, but since Intuit bought it, they've let it go downhill. The problem from a business standpoint is that it's hard to compete against free.

It's also pretty hard right now to crack the market without a lot of capital, because there isn't standardized electronic bill presentment that works in a high enough percentage of cases. Therefore, you have to web-scrape. Paytrust bootstrapped this by having billers mail paper bills to them, which they would scan and manually enter the amount due. Since virtually everyone receives bills online now, the paper API isn't really viable.

If someone came up with a common format for bills which included some metadata like amount due, due date, name of biller, plus HTML or PDF for the actual bill, it would be very useful. Then there is the question of delivery. Most banks don't want to deliver the full bill by email -- they want you to log into their site. If there were a standardized API with the ability to authorize third parties, it would make things much easier.

The only real opportunity I see is for Intuit to bring Paytrust into Mint. There could be a lot of integration between the two, and the attention to detail that Mint has could make a world of difference to Paytrust. Right now (insanely) you can't even export your paytrust transactions to Quicken, because a number of years ago, Quicken stopped supporting the QIF format, and this is the only format that Paytrust exports.