Yodlee says its BillDirect product changes the model for electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) for financial institutions, consumers and billers alike. By offering personalised alerts, tracking and charting tools that enable users to proactively manage their bills, Yodlee says the aggregation-based package offers all the benefits of the biller direct model from a central payments console.

Yodlee already presents almost two million bills per month from nearly 2500 billers through its OnCenter aggregation service. BillDirect extends the convenience of consolidated bill presentment combined with the ability to automatically log in to biller sites.

"Combining consolidated bill presentment with direct biller access is a winning model," says Avivah Litan, vice president and research director at Gartner Group. "Consumers can get the best of both worlds - convenience from the aggregation of their bills and the benefits of direct biller access, such as daily account updates and biller customer service. This model could potentially drive the long-awaited increase in consumer adoption of bill consolidation."

Today, 73% of new EBPP users pay their bills directly at biller sites rather than through their bank according to Forrester Research.

Though biller-direct delivery will continue to dominate during the next five years, TowerGroup believes the share of bills presented through consolidator sites will increase from just over 2% in 2003 to 11% by 2007, and will continue to climb thereafter.

The Massachusetts-based analyst firm expects consolidators' share of bill payment initiations to begin to recover by 2006 as developments in aggregation move the market beyond simple screen scraping, and even traditional consolidation to offer greater value and greater functionality to consumers.

Elizabeth Robertson, senior analyst in the global payments practice at TowerGroup says demand among consumers for a range of electronic bill delivery alternatives, growth in the number of electronic bills available to individual households, and an increasing emphasis on improving 'pay anyone' functionality among consolidators will drive traffic to consolidator sites.

"The continued evolution of aggregation technologies that build on the current model of biller-direct delivery will also play a role in the consolidation model's growth," she says.