Convenience Accelerates EBPP; Paper Reduction Stalls

Nineteenth Century baseball great Willie Keeler is credited with the phrase: “Hit ’em where they ain’t.” Thanks to its recent work with CheckFree, which lets customers view and pay their bills from any of the more than 3,000 third-party payment sites, AT&T Inc. can take credit for the 21st century variation: Hit ’em where they is.

AT&T customers made nearly 85 million online bill payments in 2006 and more than 92 million in 2007, an 8.2 percent increase. While many of those payments were made directly through AT&T’s Web site, millions were made through third-party sites, which provided “a very limited user experience,” said Greg Born, lead specialist for payment strategies at AT&T Mobility.

The experience was limited by use of a method called scraping, which provides a view of the basic elements of a bill, but provides no interaction and less detail. AT&T’s new Enhanced eBill Service allows wireless customers to view and pay bills online as if they were at the AT&T site, which in essence they are. “This allows customers to get a full detailed bill just as if we mailed it to them or as if they went to our Web site to view it,” said Born.

This is important to AT&T because it gives them the same opportunity to interact with customers that direct payment customers have, and allows for the same upsell and promotion.

“Service providers have spent a lot of time and money building their own Web sites and will continue to leverage them to the fullest extent to take advantage of brand equity and targeted messaging,” said Lori Stepp, director of product management at CheckFree, now a Fiserv company after being acquired last year for $4.4 billion. “But many people choose to pay their bills from one site, so service providers are thinking, ‘Why not meet them at their point of preference.’”

Born said this enhanced relationship with CheckFree was designed specifically to engage its customers who pay online and to enhance their experience. It not only ends the archaic practice of bill scraping, it gets customers back to the site.

“The goal also was to get them more integrated with our products and services,” said Brian Daly, director of payment strategies at AT&T Mobility.

AT&T Mobility has 1.5 million customers currently using the CheckFree interface. Since going live with this enhancement in April, the adoption rate has accelerated, but the company doesn’t have clear numbers yet. Its current rate of adoption for electronic billing is 15 percent to 18 percent. One-third of AT&T Mobility customers currently pay by check.

Stepp said there are now so many ways for consumers to pay their bills that billers can’t afford to ignore them. “The monthly billing touch point is very important,” she said.

The Device Becomes the Driver

Regulus, a provider of paper and electronic presentment and remittance processing solutions — itself a recently acquired company (by 3i Infotech in June) — sees electronic payments dramatically on the rise, the slight majority of which is done through direct billing to a provider’s site.