Household bills, e-mail in a single click

Imagine if you could consolidate all your accounts in one place? That's what VerticalOne aims to do on the World Wide Web.

The Atlanta-based company recently launched a service designed to save consumers the time and hassle of logging on to multiple websites often with different IDs or passwords when they want personal account information such as household bills, frequent flier mileage rewards, e-mail, investments, credit-card balances and bank statements. Much like portal sites that organise and present generic content like news, sports, weather and stock quotes, VerticalOne uses data-mining techniques to draw content in real time from several providers. It then presents this information as a private-label service in one place - the user's favourite Internet destination site, which can be opened with - you guessed it - an ID and password.

"We're not trying to be a portal," said Mr Marc Gorlin, executive vice-president at VerticalOne. "We're getting personal information from credit-card providers, email providers, banks, and travel reward schemes. We organise and aggregate it, but we don't deliver it to the end user."

Delivery is left to the company's destination site partners, of which there are now eight.

VerticalOne has not yet signed the "big fire hoses like Yahoo or Excite", Mr Gorlin said. For now, it is working with BellSouth Buzz, TheStreet.com, Cox Interactive Media, Planet Direct, AnyDay.com, the Orchestrate messaging service, DoubleClick and USA.Net.

VerticalOne is also working with 90 information providers, such as credit-card companies and banks, which will give their customers' information to these destination sites.

VerticalOne sees its immediate competitors as personal finance management software such as Intuit's Quicken, Microsoft's Money, as well as the password consolidator MyPassword.net and Mileage Miner, a travel rewards company.

Mr Gorlin said VerticalOne is the only one of these services to pull together personal account information across all markets. "We think the convenience is overwhelming," he said.

In VerticalOne's initial research, consumers listed the services they most wished to consolidate in one place on the Internet. In order of importance, these were e-mail aggregation, frequent flier mileage rewards, credit-card statements, bills, banking and brokerage accounts.

For now, most of VerticalOne's destination site partners are offering the service free to their customers, but "we're definitely looking at paying" on the sites, said Mr Gorlin.

There are two revenue models for the destination site partners.

The first is for VerticalOne and its partners to split advertising revenues. The second is for VerticalOne to charge marketing partners a monthly fee per customer acquired through the service.

A spokesman for TheStreet.com, a New York-based provider of financial news, said the VerticalOne service would be made available to some of its 66,000 online subscribers this month.

"We're definitely interested in services that offer personalisation," he said.

"This would allow our customers to have one-click access to information about their personal accounts, say to keep track of their bank accounts or brokerage information."

Atlanta-based BellSouth Buzz, the phone company's portal in nine south-east states, is using the VerticalOne technology for its own Account Keeper service, according to Mr Matthew Mulqueen, senior manager for business development at BellSouth Buzz.

"We're marketing it as a destination site where people can get local information and consolidate all their accounts and view them in a one-stop shop," Mr Mulqueen said. "It's a way to differentiate ourselves and make our customers' lives easier."

Mr Jack Staff, chief Internet economist at Zona Research in Redwood City, California, said he likes VerticalOne's software and believes it "will be useful and appeal to a great number of users".

Mr Staff cautioned that other companies were moving in this direction. Novell's DigitalMe aims to offer people a secure online identity, he said.

VerticalOne expects to have signed 16 destination site partners and to have 600,000 subscribers online by the end of the year.

Privately held VerticalOne was founded last year, employs more than 70, and recently received more than $16 million (€15 million) in equity capital.