Manilla Syndicates Its Service to Work in Email — or Anywhere

Bill pay service provider Manilla has syndicated its service to work within other online experiences, beginning with AOL Mail. Called Bill Manager, the program, with a user’s permission, accesses the data in an AOL email account to populate profiles for billers within a Manilla account.

This represents a significant change for the formerly standalone product.

The AOL mail userbase — numbering about 25 million — is a sweet spot for Manilla, CEO Jim Schinella told Bank Innovation. “The user base is concentrated in the 35-to-45 year-old range,” Schinella said. “They have busy lives, often with children, too, and bills to pay. We’re seeing more accounts added within AOL than outside it.”

Manilla recently announced its member base had hit 500,000 and expects to hit 1 million by yearend. AOL has made a “nice contribution” to that number, Schinella said, but emphasized that the service’s “organic growth rate is strong and growing.”

Email integration is an interesting use case for a bill pay provider. Why not pay bills from within your email, or from Facebook for that matter?

“Users in email are tending to business and they’re in a transactional, action-oriented mindset,” Schinella said. “They’re there to get things done. People are annoyed with email in their personal lives, there’s too much of it, but in terms of a business communicating to customers, it continues to be very important. Manilla can provide a new usefulness to email, filtering it to isolate business communications and deal with them.”

The AOL partnership also extends to AOL Finance, but AOL is just a first step. “Manilla sits on a platform that can be easily syndicated into other environments,” Schinella said. “It’s a natural fit in an online banking service. The AOL partnership took a fair amount of engineering, but we did it the right way so that it can be replicated rapidly.”

Schinella pointed out that Manilla has 3,500 businesses on file while most big banks’ bill pay platforms, according to the company, have fewer than 350. Manilla plays a role in driving paperless adoption, which is the default options for using registering a biller. This can save partners as much as $1 a month per customer.

The company also offers partners a branded experience within its app and the ability to communicate with customers they wouldn’t have with a paper bill sent through the mail. “PFM services are often just switching networks,” Schinella said. “Get a better rate here. We take a unique approach by not doing that and giving the business an opportunity to deepen its relationship.”

Mobile usage is steeply on the rise for Manilla, representing more than 50% of logins. It’s worth noting, of course, that mobile users log in far more frequently than online users, so the number of users will be somewhat lower than the logins figure. Importantly, however, more than two-thirds of new Manilla users are coming in through mobile.

“In the mobile environment, part of our value to partners is driving the download of apps,” Schinella said. “If a customer has 10 relationships, they’ll have two downloads of partner apps.”

In the mobile environment, Manilla does not sit as a folder within an AOL environment, but is engineered to connect from either a browser-based mail experience or the app.

Schinella foresees a deeper role in Manilla’s relationship with the customer, and therefore its value for potential partners.

“We think there is a tremendous amount of valuable information in the documents being delivered to people’s homes,” he said. “People don’t just want more data, they want actionable data. Am I leaving value on the table with my cellphone bill, cable, utilities. We’re taking a deeper look at bills.”