Virgin Media goes live with OneVu

31st October 2007 – Virgin Media, the UK’s leading entertainment and communications company, has announced a new way for its cable customers to view and pay their bills. The company has signed up for the OneVu service which enables people to see, track and pay all their bills from the familiar, secure environment of their online bank.

Virgin Media has 5 million cable customers and is committed to ensuring that all customer interactions with the company are simple and convenient. The service is gradually being rolled out to all Virgin Media cable customers between now and 2008 with over 1.6 million customers already able to receive the service. Customers can check availability of the service online if they bank with Lloyds TSB, Royal Bank of Scotland or NatWest; other banks will follow over the coming months.

The OneVu service, which is branded ‘Bill manager’ at Lloyds TSB and ‘Bill management’ at RBS and NatWest, offers consumers a consolidated view of all their bills and statements whilst online ‘at the bank’. An additional advantage is the ability to securely click through to individual company websites without the need to remember further usernames and passwords.

Other billing organisations who have signed up include: Southern Electric, Scottish Hydro Electric, SWALEC and Atlantic Electric and Gas, South East Water, Anglian Water, Bournemouth and West Hampshire Water, Bristol Water, Colchester Borough Council, EDF Energy Gas, Thames Water, EDF Energy Electricity, Essex and Suffolk Water, Nectar, Northumbrian Water, Southern Water, Sutton and East Surrey Water, Lloyds Credit Cards, Sainsbury’s Energy Gas, Sainsbury’s Energy Electricity, Good Energy, TV Licensing and Wessex Water.

Cormac Connolly, Director of Billing Operations at Virgin Media, said: “At Virgin Media we are a company that understands people as much as technology and the decision to sign up with OneVu is underpinned by our commitment to outstanding customer service. We are confident that it will significantly boost efficiency and result in less wasted paper, less printing and postage, lower processing costs, better customer communications and an overall reduction in our impact on the environment.”

Miles Quitmann, Director at OneVu, said: “Many organisations in the UK have invested heavily in electronic billing systems to enable their consumers to view and pay their bills online. But consumer take-up has been low as people found it too time-consuming to log onto multiple websites and so these organisations had failed to reap the rewards of their investment.

The OneVu solution complements the investment already made. Its strategy is to use the bank’s online portal as the secure access to bills from multiple organisations, thereby increasing the usage of individual electronic billing services and meeting customer demand. Many forward-thinking billers are already taking advantage of these benefits.”

Editor’s note:

OneVu is the UK’s first service which lets people see, track and pay all their bills from the familiar, secure environment of their online bank. It is a joint venture between VocaLink, which processes over 4 billion financial transactions each year, and CheckFree Corporation, the global leader in financial electronic commerce services.

Virgin Media

Virgin Media is an innovative and pioneering UK entertainment and communications business. For the first time consumers can get everything they need from one company – the UK’s only quad play of TV, broadband, phone and mobile plus the most advanced TV on-demand service available, the UK’s first high definition TV service and V+, our high specification personal video recorder. We’re the UK’s most popular residential broadband provider, the largest virtual mobile network operator and the second largest provider of pay TV and home phone.

Virgin Media owns two content businesses – Virgin Media Television (VMTV) and sit-up. VMTV owns eight entertainment channels – Virgin 1, Living, Living 2, Bravo, Bravo 2, Challenge, Trouble and Ftn – and is a 50% partner in UKTV which consists of ten channels including UKTV Gold and UKTV History. Sit-up runs retail TV channels bid tv, price-drop tv and speed auction tv.

For further information please contact:
Judith Thompson, The Weston Partnership,
Tel: 01403 891 514
07771 591 501
judith@westonpartnership.co.uk