Will an “iTunes” Type of Web site for ebilling Ever Come into Being?

Last month an interesting article was published on a blog which made a very useful reference to on line music, and iTunes in particular, in relation to ebilling. In his article the author suggested that if we thought about bills in music terms:
• CDs (and the artists that produce them) are like paper bills;
• Listening to music online is like logging in to a portal to view and pay your bill; and
• Downloading a song (file) to your chosen device from iTunes is like receiving your bill as a file (attachment) to your PC, tablet, iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc.

This article rather strangely goes on to conclude that all music and bills should be delivered by email attachment so that customers can open it/them on all their different listening or reading devices.

Despite that fact that this article seems to get a little lost quite quickly, it does draw a useful general analogy and it is therefore worth looking at the core question that it hints at but never answers-will an iTunes type of web site for ebilling ever come into being (and how of course)?

First and foremost let’s get the comparisons right here:
• Songs (or “albums” of songs) should be compared to bills in general
• Artists should be compared to merchants (and some of both are very large and some are tiny)
• Record companies should be compared to banks
• Music listeners should be compared to customers or bill payers
• CD’s (or Vinyl) should be compared to paper-delivered bills
• Online Audio type files (MP3’s, WAVs etc) should be compared to online emails with attachments
• An online store (like iTunes) should be compared to an online bill-payment portal

You’ll notice that we do not yet talk about a delivery device like a smart phone or tablet in the above table-we’ll cover this later.

The Music Scene
If we look back at recent history, up until as little as 10 years ago, the music industry had been operating in similar fashion for decades. Artists produced songs and approached record companies to back them. If they were successful, the record company would help getting the song(s) to market on vinyl as a single or a long play record, getting the songs played on radio and elsewhere so that people would buy what they liked in main street record stores. Innovation in the music industry was very slow to come. Vinyl eventually became CD’s and radio went slowly from analogue to digital. However, the biggest changes were in listening devices, which became increasingly portable. This was led by Sony’s “Walkman” in 1979-the first step towards MP3 players which led to the huge industry paradigm shift-the iPod-introduced in late 2001 (and the new iTunes music store two years later in 2003).

When Apple arrived on the music scene the portable MP3 scene was ripe for change to something simpler and more appealing to customers. In this sense, the iPod, iTouch and finally the iphone and iPad all became the simplest and most user-friendly way to listen to music (both on a live streaming basis and recorded). As a result, the music industry has been almost completely transformed commercially and listeners (or at least those with a 3G/4G connection and/or access to the Internet) have more choice and convenience than they ever had before.

The Billing Scene
So how does this compare to the billing sector? Like music, billing has operating in similar ways for decades. Bills (the song comparison) have been and still are delivered mostly in very traditional ways, especially by small and medium sized merchants (the artist comparison). This is by paper in the mail as the simplest format (a bit like the vinyl single) or by mail with a plain PDF attachment (the CD comparison). In some cases, the email with attachment may be a little more dynamic and sophisticated and can collect signatures for example (used in the B2B billing world). This is more comparable to the MP3 or wav files in the music world.

Although a dominant player like Apple and a site like iTunes has yet to “explode” in the billing world, we are getting very close to it happening now. For some years, online bill payment has been available at a merchant’s web site, although this does make for some inconvenience for customers when they need to pay a lot of bills (or listen to a lot of songs from different artists at different record companies). Online bill payment has also been available at bank sites for many years now and has become quite well-used by the same people who took quickly to Internet banking. Unfortunately, full digital presentment is not normally available via this channel, so both of these valuable innovations are comparable to the “Walkman”-they have taken us some of the way but there is room for improvement.

The private “cloud-based” bill presentment and payment portal is a much newer innovation in the last 2-3 years, and is much closer to being the billing “paradigm shift” we talked about earlier. In this system, customers can see bills from a given merchant (an artist in music terms) and subscribe to get all the bills they send (or songs they release). Because this is non-merchant owned or bank owned (the equivalent of sometimes cutting out the record companies), customers can see many merchants (or artists), and thus have the capacity to ultimately start to see all of their bills in one place. Naturally, paying bills is never a fun activity like listening to music but the quicker and more easily you can deal with them the better (and you can get back to what you like doing much more speedily). Having all your bills in one online place (with free back and storage and easy retrieval whenever you need access) is the equivalent of getting all of their songs in one playbook-just as iTunes allows now. Customers can then keep these bills (or songs) permanently stored in one place and revisit them whenever they like. These bills are all fully digital and do not have multiple file formats that have to be tackled (much as Apple made MP3, WAV and other music file formats an irrelevance to the listener).

Perhaps most importantly, customers can access their bills at the portal from any device that is connected to the Internet by some means-a computer, a smart phone, a tablet etc. And because this is all digital, customers can use all of the currently available and evolving technology that is available such as bookmarking, flexible sorting (like assembling playlists) and using SMS alerts for example (to prompt the customer when there is a bill to pay or a credit card to update, just as you would when a new song or album by an artist has been released). Of course this is not to exclude other ways of getting a bill in any other format that may be wanted-you can still send an email or a PDF or even print them if you like.

Summary
We are not suggesting that bills are anywhere near as much fun to ‘access’ as music and you will of course listen to the same song a lot more than you will use the same bill. However, we think the broad analogy here is a useful one. Our general conclusion is that the online bill presentment and payment portal is already here and like iTunes will transform the bill payment sector over the next few years just as Apple did. There are a few innovative companies that are competing to be the “big gorilla” at the moment but it is inevitable that one of these will emerge soon as the dominant player in this space. A few early adopters (the merchants or artists as they would be in the music scene) already understand this and are quickly getting on board. For these merchants this is a relatively painless transition, with no capital outlay and they can be in the online bill presentment and payment space almost immediately to reap the benefits.