Agreement needed for online invoices

By RICHARD WOOD

New Zealand is lagging behind Australia in bringing electronic invoices into online banking services.

The major Australian banks started their cooperative system called Bpay View at the end of January and builds on Australia's long-standing Bpay phone and internet bill payment service.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia started the scheme with a Victorian State Government-owned water utility.

Nineteen billers are waiting to follow suit, and 7000 more are already involved in Bpay.

The other Australian banks will offer the service in the next few months.

New Zealand banks need to share one service or agree on the same file format so billers can produce a standard billing format, no matter which bank the customer nominates.

New Zealand Post's eBill service can pull in payments from banks but its service is not integrated into the various banks' online sites. Nor is it linked to the online services of its just-launched Kiwibank.

The ASB bank's chief manager of ASB online, Mathew Bartlett, said bank websites were the perfect place to gather bills, present them and then make payment.

But he agreed it needed a cooperative approach. ASB bank had previously tested electronic invoicing with Contact Energy and found it unsustainable to go it alone.

"The best proposition is to go to billers with a consortium of banks, with one file type" said Mr Bartlett.

"You then provide a strong value add proposition for banks and billers," .

WestpacTrust head of e-business Stu Woollett said the Australians originally created Bpay because they needed to develop a neutral system when they implemented telephone bill payments.

But in New Zealand it was harder to get that level of cooperation.

He said while it would be inefficient for each bank to do its own bill presenting system, it was also unlikely they would do it together.

BNZ head of online solutions Phil Tait, who was originally involved in the development of NZ Post's eBill, said there were no plans in New Zealand to replicate what Bpay could do.

New Zealand differed from Australia in that there were many preregistered billers on separate lists of each bank's phone banking system - whereas in Australia there was a single list.