Wells Fargo has partnered with Bill.com to embed the vendor’s online bill payment technology within the bank’s digital portal for business clients, which is called Commercial Electronic Office, or CEO.
Business customers will be able to pay their bills and keep their books within Wells Fargo’s commercial banking website and mobile banking app.
This is Bill.com’s ninth bank partnership; it already works with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, PNC Financial Services Group and others. About 2.5 million businesses use its technology to get paid. The company is valued at $10 billion.
The Wells Fargo deal is significant for Bill.com because Wells is the largest U.S. commercial bank; it has about 80,000 business customers. The bigger Bill.com’s network of users becomes, the more useful it is. About 90% of small to midsize businesses still send and receive paper-based invoices, the company estimates.
“We're going to be working very hard with [Wells Fargo] to do things at massive scale,” said Josh Goines, senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Bill.com. “Wells Fargo brings a wealth of strong go-to-market capabilities, vast reach and deep experience in how to engage their direct customers.”
Wells Fargo is driven by a need to improve the customer experience for its treasury clients, according to Chris Noe, senior vice president of product management at Wells Fargo.
“Several years ago we foresaw a need to help customers more easily make and receive payments,” Noe said.
The pandemic has heightened this need. “The timing is absolutely critical to be able to bring the solution to market now when our customers truly do need it the most,” Noe said.
The Bill.com software, which is called Bill Manager, electronically captures incoming paper bills and invoices and digitally routes them through a workflow for review and approval.
Wells Fargo evaluated several vendors and considered building a billing solution in house before settling on Bill.com.
The work with Bill.com fits within two broader objectives at the Wells, Noe said. One is to make it easier for customers to do business with the company.
“We feel like partnerships with partners like Bill.com that support a simplified onboarding and enrollment experience to get customers up and running — making payments and receiving payments in a very short amount of time — really help to deliver on that,” Noe said.
The other is to collaborate more with fintechs.
“We are seeing a tremendous amount of innovation from the fintech space,” Noe said. “This is about starting with our customer needs and figuring out where we've got opportunities to either build ourselves or look at opportunities for partnership to bring those solutions to market faster and with leading technologies."
