Citi Cards to Offer Manilla Online Bill Payment Hub to Customers

Service stores bills, account statements and subscriptions online and provides bill payment reminders.

Citi Cards has partnered with Manilla, a personal account management service that launched today. Manilla is intended to help consumers manage household accounts including bills, finances, travel rewards programs and subscriptions online. Customers can view account information, receive reminders to pay bills and obtain free storage of their account statements, notices, offers and bills online.

Manilla demonstrated its platform at Demo Spring:

"We are committed to helping our customers lead healthy financial lives and to bringing them innovative services like Manilla, which help them manage their household finances while also providing a new way to go paperless," says Vanessa Colella, who heads marketing for Citi's North America Consumer Bank.

Manilla today will start rolling out closed beta access on an individual basis to those who request invitations at www.manilla.com. The service will store online bank account statements, household bills, magazine subscriptions and travel rewards programs and automatically link users to their accounts so they can pay bills, book travel and renew subscriptions. Manilla says that eventually, it will support all categories of business relationships for which a customer has an account relationship.

Manilla claims to offer businesses a way to efficiently communicate with consumers, increase customer engagement and reduce mailing costs. Businesses in the U.S. mail nearly 48 billion account notices, statements, offers and bills to their customers every year. On average, approximately 11% of consumers opt to go paperless, according to InfoTrends.

Citi Cards and Comcast are the first two companies to market the Manilla.com platform to their customers. Manilla is hosted by publishing company Hearst. Pitney Bowes announced a similar "Digital Mailbox" called Volly in January. Startup Doxo also has a household accounts organization platform.