Creating a Stickier Bill Pay Site

At this year's Retail Delivery show in Orlando, CheckFree (Atlanta) unveiled CheckFree Financial View -- a suite of interactive financial management features for its bank clients' retail customers. The product provides consumers with several tools to help them manage their cash flow and track their finances, according to the company.

"It's a data management and planning tool, just like your kitchen table," says Matthew Lewis, EVP and general manager, electronic commerce division, CheckFree. "You know how you sit at your kitchen table and have all your bills spread out? That's what [Financial View] is like."

According to Lewis, Financial View fills a gap left open by popular financial planning software. The tool gives users a consolidated view of all activity with their financial institutions -- it integrates electronic bill payment transaction histories, allows automatic payment categorization and integrates account activity on bank-issued credit and debit cards. Also, Financial View automatically populates the data for users, eliminating manual input.

Wyomissing, Pa.-based Sovereign Bank ($63 billion in assets) will be the first to pilot Financial View, starting in April. "We're looking at Financial View from a competitive point of view," says Marianne Doran-Collins, a Sovereign SVP and director of online banking and affinity relationships. Since Financial View is bank-branded and allows customers to access information only while logged onto the bank's Web site, Doran-Collins adds that the product should improve the stickiness of Sovereign's Internet offering. * --Maria Bruno-Britz