Can Merchants really turn off paper bills with digital billing?

Within the billing world, going paperless has been almost like a “Holy Grail” for many merchants, and especially those who are sending out thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of bills a month in some cases. And who can blame them? Merchants who send out more than just a few hundred invoices each month are typically spending a great deal of money on printing, putting invoices into envelopes, sending out reminders and/or statements, franking the envelope, having to engage in making sure bills are filed or stored properly and fielding calls from customers who don’t receive a the bill in the mail at all (so it has to be resent) to name but a few things.

By adopting a paperless invoice or digital bill only solution, a merchant can technically avoid all of the above and “switch off paper” immediately. However, despite the apparent significant  advantages to the merchant, this may not be the best way to go (and it should also not be the driver of the change to digital billing).

Most customers have been getting bills in the mail, or at least ones they can print if they are sent by email, for many years and many want to stick with a process that they well understand. Hence, any merchant that removes the option of receiving a paper bill risks losing a customer’s business altogether. Far better therefore to retain the option to receive a physical bill and either deliver it by cost-effective e-mail or allow a customer to retrieve it and print it for themselves from a central website.

With a cloud-based system such as PaySwyft, not only can any merchant post a digital bill but allow customers to print the bill whenever they like. Even better a merchant can email the bill if they so wish, including follow-up or chase bills. And once customers are using such a fully digital portal they can also use a whole range of convenient technology to manage their bill in more flexible ways. This includes:

• Receiving a monthly e-mail notification when a new invoice is available to view.
• Decreasing the possibility of mail fraud and identity theft.
• Automatically calendarising or secheduling payments at a time or date to suit them
• Set email and/or SMS alerts as they like
• Store and retrieve all invoice and payment records whenever they like, forever
• Make payment 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
• Pay in a multitude of ways at the same portal and get a receipt there and then
• See all of their invoices and payments when they want
• Analyse invoice trends and patterns as they wish

This does not mean that they will necessarily “turn off” the paper bill, or stop printing it, but over time the resistance to doing so will clearly lessen. And in the meantime, not only is the customer getting a convenient service for free, that they can use at work or home on their computer (and save themselves time if they were previously paying by cash or cheque in particular), but a merchant is saving money on many fronts, including fielding less phone calls, accelerating cash-flow with earlier online payments and reconciling payments in a much more straightforward way than ever before. Given all of this, getting to a paperless world, if and when it happens, is only a minor bonus.

Will Mobile Phones Become the Dominant Channel for Bill Delivery?

There are now a multitude of channels available to customers to pay their bills. These channels include:
1. Print and mail (paper-based)
2. Fax
3. Email with embedded data
4. Data interchange (system-to-system)
5. Email with PDF and/or link to on-line
6. Customer Web Portal
7. Mobile (MMS; HTML; WAP; USSD)
8. Mobile via App
9. Mobile Tablet
10. Emergent technology (via cable TV etc)

Only print and mail on the above list existed as an option until around 30 years ago when fax arrived and 25 years ago when email came along (both of which still have quite a strong following today). Data interchange options were mainly evolved and used in the B2B rather than direct Business to customer or B2C space but again are still around today as a strong channel, supported in the main by large international software companies, who have sufficiently large installed volumes to want to protect their position in the billing market.

Web based technology has driven the greatest change in the billing space in the last 10 years or so and seen the emergence of both consumer and merchant portals (for presentment and payment) and the use of mobile technology as 3G and 4G have made the internet available to mobile phones.

Even though each of these channels presents a new and perhaps better and more convenient choice to a given customer (and are often presented as the channel to replace earlier channel choices) in reality, they are often just additional options. In other words, consumers have shown time and time again that they like the extra choice but do not necessarily want to be driven too quickly to only one channel (however “efficient and effective” it is presented to be).

The implication of customers wanting lots of channel choice to both view and pay their bills is that the same bill may need to be presented and rendered possible to pay in several channels, at least for now.

Today’s challenges
Some technology experts are starting to say that customers will be move rapidly away from e-billing to m-billing (m for mobile of course) in the next few years. Modern mobiles can certainly handle very complex tasks today - just look at the hundred of thousands of Apps available for all different platforms. These Apps can do complex tasks, even generating bills “on-the-fly”. A mobile can also handle a simple task such as bill presentment with ease today – in some cases on quite a detailed basis (even though reading it may present quite a challenge!). However, viewing a PDF bill attachment on a mobile (as opposed to a tablet) is often a long scrolling exercise, making it impractical in most cases. There is a solution to this but it needs the biller to solve the problem of displaying their bills in more flexible ways according to the kind of mobile platform to which it is being delivered. In this way, a customer can see a simple version of the way and then “drill into the detail” as they wish when they want to see itemisation. 

However, perhaps all of this is a false dilemma. In the final analysis, customers do not care if a bill is delivered to their computer, their tablet or their mobile (or even all three). In fact, many want to see it delivered in as many ways as possible to allow maximum flexibility, including by email or by PDF attachment and even in the physical mail or fax on some occasions. This multi-channel approach is therefore a customer centric approach. The challenge for billers then is how to provide as many of these channels as possible at the lowest cost possible. In the end there is only one solution to this –use a full digital bill presentment and payment portal, such as PaySwyft for example. This not only means that a bill can be sent in all nine of the current channels above (and can be paid at the same portal) but means that a biller would be well-placed to take advantage of the new emergent technologies that will come along in the near future.