Bank of America and Wells Fargo have gone live with the clearXchange person-to-person payments platform, which enables users to send and receive payments through online and mobile banking using just an e-mail address or mobile phone number.
Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo announced plans for the clearXchange system in May last year. The collaborative venture is intended to provide a competitive deterrent to PayPal and other vendor-led programmes such as Fiserv's Popmoney from encroaching on the banks' core payments territory. The founding banks will own the processing platform, but plan to expand it to other financial institutions in the near future.
Following a one-month trial run in Arizona, Wells is the first of the three JV partners to take the service nationwide, branding it simply as Send and Receive Money.
Brett Pitts, senior vice president at Wells Fargo's Internet services group, says: "With Send & Receive Money customers can send payments electronically to others without having to know their sensitive financial information, such as bank account numbers. As mobile money transfer becomes more common, remembering multiple account numbers will be harder. Send & Receive Money allows customers to pay another person using information they typically either know or have programmed on their phone."
Initially, both the sender and the receiver of the money need to be a customer of one of those three banks, but over time the service will be expanded to encompass other banks says Pitts.