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In this look at the current state of online bill pay systems, we focused on the following questions:
- How are various bill pay features presented and organized?
- What options and tools can users take advantage of when scheduling payments?
- Are companies offering advanced tools for finding payee or eBiller information?
- Which firms are working to integrate new features and options into the bill pay experience?
As online bill pay has become more commonplace, so too have baseline bill pay features such as multiple payment options and payment history archives. Each of the 16 firms we cover currently offers an online payment tool that facilitates all three main scheduling types – one-time, future and recurring. Most firms now allow users to schedule multiple one-time payments simultaneously from the Bill Pay homepage, though only two banks allow users to set recurring payments from this single interface as well. Recurring payment options are similar across all firms, with each bank enabling users to set payments on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual basis. One reason for this conformity is the fact that nearly 70% of firms now use Fiserv’s CheckFree payment technology.
Among the rarer bill pay tools is peer-to-peer payments. Currently facilitated by only two banks, peer-to-peer payments allow users to move money to each other electronically, bypassing the sending of paper checks.
This report also discusses the following key findings:
- All firms offer at least three months of payment history, with 75% offering 18 months or more
- When adding payees, 88% of firms offer name Search tools for known payees, with seven banks also offering phone-number based search
- One bank allows users to add an external account as a payment account in their Bill Pay interface, essentially aggregating an in-coming ACH transfer and outgoing payment into a single step
- Nearly 70% of firms now allow users to receive eBills
Segment: Banking
Publication date: Wednesday, June 30, 2010
# Pages: (58 pages) |
