FOCUS - Yahoo! begins offering online billing
By Gilles Castonguay
NEW YORK, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Internet media network Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) said on Wednesday it had begun letting its users pay bills and send checks over the Internet through a partnership with CheckFree Corp. (Nasdaq:CKFR - news) as part of an expansion of its services in personal finance.
Yahoo!, one of the world's most popular Internet destinations, said the new service enabled users in the United States to pay their phone bills and send checks to their landlords from any computer connected to the Internet.
Many banks already offer the service on their Websites.
Yahoo! said it would offer online billing through Yahoo! Finance (http://finance.yahoo.com), one of the most visited of its more than 50 Web sites that offers services such as financial news and access to online banking accounts.
''It is Yahoo!'s goal in the finance category to offer robust, easy-to-use personal finance resources,'' Mike Riley, the property's senior producer, told Reuters.
A CheckFree spokeswoman said the partnership would help the leading provider of online billing expand its market reach.
''The game is distribution,'' she said.
Yahoo! shares closed down 1-9/16 at 153-7/16, while CheckFree lost 2-1/16 to end at 35-3/4, following a downward trend among technology stocks on the Nasdaq market.
Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Yahoo! said it received about 310 million page views each day. Its personal finance site, meanwhile, is visited by about 5.8 percent of Web users from home and 13.6 percent from work, according to Media Metrix, which measures the reach of Web sites.
Yahoo!, whose partnership with CheckFree was previously announced, said registered users with a personal identification number could sign up for a free three-month trial of the service, called Yahoo! Bill Pay.
Those who wanted to keep using it after the trial could choose from two payment plans, it said.
The first cost $2 per month, plus $0.40 per payment for an unlimited number of payments per month. The second cost $7 per month for up to 25 payments, plus $0.40 for each additional payment after 25.
Once a payment was made, CheckFree would debit the bank account from which it was made, it said, adding that a fee would then appear on the bank statement as a bill payment fee.
The partnership was the second to be forged by CheckFree with an Internet company, the first being with Quicken.com, run by Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq:INTU - news), owner of nearly 20 percent of CheckFree.
Based in Atlanta, Ga., CheckFree has since entered talks with other companies. |
