New Bill Payment Portal Gives Banks a Run For the Money

By Pete Rizzo (@pete_rizzo_)

Founded in 2011 and launched out of closed beta this November, Finovera may seem like just another personal finance management service at first glance, with an interface that resembles Intuit’s Mint service and even alternative banking provider Simple.

All the usual features were there: graph, tables and chart interfaces in bright colors, as was the familiar promise to make piles of financial data consumer-friendly. According to founder Purna Pareek, however, Finovera isn’t a competitor to financial management services, but rather a complementary solution that focuses on a separate pain point: bill payment and document management.

For Pareek, his search for a solution like Finovera started like most consumer searches, on Google (Jump to 0:35). However, unlike most people, Pareek wasn’t satisfied with the available market options. Instead of settling, Pareek assembled a team to prototype a service that would aggregate bill information from banks, credit card providers and billers.

But, despite offering an enticing, and potentially valuable, catalog of features to consumers, Pareek has pledged to keep Finovera free, for as long as the service continues to run. So, how does Finovera plan to make money? The answer, according to Pareek, is by turning a potential enemy into an ally.

“The way we will make money is through partnerships with banks, financial institutions and billers,” Pareek told PYMNTS.com (Jump to 7:25). “We offer [our] services and back-end engines to FIs and they will offer the same services on their banking sites and bill pay sites.”

Monetization concerns aside, however, Finovera must still convince consumers that investing so much data in an online “digital filing cabinet” is worth the risk.

Given that Finovera is housing so much information for consumers, Pareek said that it is taking a host of precautions to prevent attacks (Jump to 3:50) . For more on Finovera’s monetization strategy, and how banks have so far responded to the service since its launch, listen to our full podcast with Pareek here.

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