Pageonce Strengthens Mobile Bill Pay, Aims to Cut Clutter

Pageonce, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based money management and bill pay company, announced Thursday bill pay enhancements made to its Money & Bills app. Its new archive capability could make it a competitor to banks' mobile bill payment offerings.

The Money & Bills app lets a user pay bills, view account balances and receive alerts, among other things, after he links his personal accounts, such as credit cards and bills and utilities.

The app is available for download in the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store.

With the latest app update, users can now schedule their bill payments. Previously, they had to pay a bill then and there. The app now also includes a tab labeled "File Cabinet," which lets a user save statements from billers.

"The idea is to reduce clutter," Steve Schultz, COO of Pageonce tells BTN. "[The feature] gives users confidence that they can get all the bills in one place and not have to rifle through paper statements."

To date, most common payments made through the app are "the typical set of obligations that people have in their lives," Schultz says. That includes cable, utility and credit card bills.

Pageonce says it has more than seven million users.

The improved bill pay features point to a trend in budgeting tools evolving to capture a wider audience. To summarize how Mark Schwanhausser, director of multi-channel financial services at Javelin Strategy & Research, put it: PFM tools are no longer just for the 1980s nerd.

"Pageonce is fitting into the new definition of PFM," Schwanhausser says, crediting it, in part, to the startup's mobile focus. Indeed, Javelin published a report on bill pay innovators in April, arguing that the vendor will provide consumers with greater always-on, all-in-one-place oversight and control that their banks aren't offering.

"It comes down to: who does it better," Schwanhausser says. "Ultimately consumers will decide for themselves."