Allied Payment Network, a provider of online and mobile bill payment services to the financial industry, announced that is has partnered with ACI Worldwide, a leading international provider of electronic payment and banking systems, to offer same-day bill payment capabilities through Allied's mobile photo bill pay solution, Picture PayTM.
Picture Pay will integrate with the ACI Bill Payment Engine and proprietary Biller Endpoint NetworkTM (BEN), an electronic biller network that delivers millions of payments to more than 9,000 electronic biller endpoints each month.
By seamlessly integrating with the ACI Bill Payment Engine, Picture Pay's end users now have the added convenience of a same-day payment option to immediately process a bill payment. With Picture Pay, mobile banking users simply take a picture of any bill with their smartphone, enter the amount and payment date, and the bill is paid. Picture Pay's technology reads the data from the bill, and then syncs with the user's bank or credit union to process the payment. Picture Pay's standardized bill payment option typically takes one to three days.
With premium same-day and next-day payment options, financial institutions will not only give their customers more control over the timing of their payments, but it will generate new revenue for the institution. Expedited payments also enable financial institutions' customers to retain their funds for as long as possible while avoiding penalties.
"Our goal is to simplify the bill payment process as much as possible while driving this process to the more convenient mobile channel, and with Picture Pay, financial institutions' customers can even add a new biller with the simple snap of a photo," said Ralph Marcuccilli, president of Allied Payment Network. "By partnering with ACI, we can now provide Picture Pay users with a whole new level of convenience - same-day bill payment processing, which in turn generates additional fee revenue for our financial institution customers."
"ACI's vast biller network includes thousands of billers, financial institutions, walk-in payment locations and other service providers, which enables our partners to achieve high electronic and payment success rates. It also provides partners the ability to manage their own bill payment user interfaces and a real-time, consistent customer experience, part of our Universal Payments strategy of providing a complete set of end-to-end payment services," said Eric Labiak, senior vice president, ACI Worldwide. "We look forward to partnering with Allied as it rolls out its enhanced Picture Pay solution and grows bill payment volume."