Wausau Financial, ClairMail Introduce GreenPayments for Mobile

Green Payments creates a channel for new expedited fee income; the expedited payments opportunity has been sized by Javelin Research as a $2 billion missed opportunity for billers. Additionally, according to MQA Research, 49% of customers would use a mobile banking/payment application if the opportunity was available. Moreover, Juniper Research estimates that as many as 204 million users will generate mobile payment transactions worth $22 billion by the year 2011.

GreenPayments give consumers the control to authorize transactions from a pre-registered account that provides the convenience of recurring payments while keeping them in control of when money leaves their account. With GreenPayments, a 2-way actionable alert message is sent to the payer's mobile phone with bill payment details such as payee name, dollar amount and due date. Consumers can reply to the message to instantly pay the bill from their mobile phone; if the consumer decides not to pay at that time, he will receive up to two more bill payment alerts and can pay by simply responding with a “yes” reply. This offering is available as an ASP for rapid deployment and adoption.

“Recurring payments are extremely valuable to billers as a way to ensure on time payment of bills each month drafted on the same day,” said Todd Juracek – President, Enterprise Payments for WAUSAU Financial Systems. “Consumers typically do not like to give up that much control and recurring payment adoption has not been very good. WFS’ GreenPayments serves as a way for consumers to give authorization of transactions from a previously set up account that approximates a recurring payment service while keeping control in the hands of the consumer. Not to mention, billers can improve receivables payments by up to 20 days, reduce costs compared to processing paper checks and improve the environment with less paper usage and reduced transportation costs, aligning with green efforts, providing significant benefits to all of the participants involved in the lockbox chain.”

To illustrate the positive environmental effects, suppose a person receives 5 paper bill statements and pays 5 bills by mail with a check every month. If that person were to use GreenPayments instead, that would save 2 pounds of paper, prevent 18 gallons of wastewater from discharging into oceans, lakes and rivers and avoid the emission of 76 pounds of greenhouse gases. This would be the equivalent of driving 73 fewer miles every month.

“ClairMail is thrilled that our industry-leading 2-way mobile payments platform is an integral part of WAUSAU’s GreenPayments solution, as it benefits everyone – consumers, financial institutions and billers – along with the environment,” said Joseph Salesky, President and CEO of ClairMail. “The ClairMail System is a highly scalable and robust solution which can process hundreds of thousands of transactions every minute, and we are pleased to partner with WAUSAU to make GreenPayments a reality.”