Yahoo! PayDirect was the name of a person-to-person

money transfer service In the legal code of the United States, a money transmitter or money transfer service is a business entity that provides money transfer services or payment instruments. Money transmitters in the US are part of a larger group of entities called m ...

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

via

HSBC HSBC Holdings plc is a British multinational universal bank and financial services holding company. It is the largest bank in Europe by total assets ahead of BNP Paribas, with US$2.953 trillion as of December 2021. In 2021, HSBC had $10.8 tri ...

, competing with

Billpoint Billpoint was the name of a person-to-person money transfer service founded in 1998, and purchased in 1999 by online auctioneer eBay. History Billpoint was founded in 1998 by S. Young Lee, Hope Chen, Will Chen, Jason May, Ian Flint and Jay She ...

and

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

. Yahoo launched PayDirect in March 2000 after purchasing Arthas.com, a provider of electronic billing services. Arthas' dotBank.com service allowed customers to make online bill payments and to exchange money with other customers. When Yahoo took over the site, the accounts were managed by the international bank HSBC. In 2000, Yahoo extended the Yahoo PayDirect service to mobile phones, as part of its Yahoo Everywhere initiative. Yahoo PayDirect was initially launched with CIBC National Bank as the financial partner (based in Maitland, Florida, and a subsidiary of CIBC - one of the major Canadian banks). The service was subsequently migrated to HSBC. The Yahoo PayDirect service was discontinued effective November 22, 2004, leaving only a web page
biz.yahoo.com/paydirect
showing "The PayDirect service and web site is closed and now unavailable."

See also