Mastercard has launched a new digital solution that allows customers to manage regular utility, rent, credit card, mortgage and other regularly billed accounts without having to set up accounts with different billers or remember multiple passwords and dates for payments each month. The company's new Bill Pay Exchange is offered through banks and credit unions to enable consumers to use their mobile banking app to easily set up all billers, receive notifications on payments due, view billing details and manage multiple accounts in one place, while also allowing customers to specify when and how much to pay various accounts.

Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange will link to The Clearing House's (TCH'S) real-time payments infrastructure, which was built with technology from the Mastercard company, Vocalink. This will enable consumers to pay their bills instantly from their bank accounts — in a matter of seconds versus days — reducing the delay between when the payment is made and when it is reflected in the consumer's balance.

"Mastercard is accelerating its vision of digitizing all forms of payments to make life simple, seamless and secure," Mastercard Executive Vice President of New Payment Flows, North America, Colleen Taylor, said in the release. "With Vocalink, we are in a unique position as the only network that has the technology capabilities and know-how to build faster payments applications at the pace the market requires."

Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange, will bring speed, transparency and efficiency to bill payments, including several benefits to billers such as reduction of reconciliation costs achieved by delivering remittance details in bulk or alongside payments, and decrease in costs associated with mailing paper bills and processing paper checks.

The company said Mastercard's network of billing partners will drive adoption of the offering. Over the last 30 years, Mastercard has built a network of 135,000 billers to support traditional bank bill pay, and the company plans to broaden biller coverage even further. ACI Worldwide, Aliaswire, Inlet and Transactis have also signed on to develop the Bill Pay Exchange which  will facilitate real-time payment messaging and confirmation.

Likewise, those companies' billing information will allow banks to auto-suggest billers to their customers so they don't have to manually add the businesses to whom they make regular payments. Mastercard will begin product integration and testing of Bill Pay Exchange with partners in 2019 with commercial availability the same year.