Home eBilling eBilling Overview

The eBilling 'Push' Advantage

Striata clients achieve dramatically higher adoption rates:
  • North American utility, Whitby Hydro achieved 8% paper turn-off in the first 12 months.
  • Time Warner Cable has achieved adoption rates ranging from 46.5% to 87.79% across all its regions.
  • Denver Water has achieved 14.7% adoption to date.

The 'Push' email billing solution results in higher customer adoption because it is convenient, easy to use and requires no effort by the customer. This high level of convenience has achieved high rates of paper turn off, resulting in savings on operational costs and ROI

    eBilling Challenges & Benefits

    Billing managers concern themselves with 3 important goals:
    1. Getting paid
    2. Getting paid faster
    3. Reducing billing costs while getting paid faster

    Electronic billing (eBilling or EBPP) is an obvious option for both getting paid faster and reducing billing costs. When evaluating electronic billing options to achieve these goals, the most important question to ask is: what kind of adoption rates can I expect?

    How Does 'Push' eBilling Work

    The different eBilling models of today
    Biller Direct Push – bills are sent by the biller directly to the customer as an attachment to an email

    Biller Direct Pull – Billers pull customers back to their website to fetch the bill

    Bank Aggregation – Banks display bill summaries for different billers within Internet banking

    Bill Consolidators – bills are collected from various billers and displayed within a single web interface.

    an eBilling model that achieves the highest customer adoption rates, quickest return on investment and is easy to implement is the ideal win.

    'Push' & 'Pull' Complementary Billing Solutions

    Email billing and web based billing have fundamentally different approaches to consumer traffic:
    • 'Push' - Email document delivery: Bills, statements and other documents are delivered as secure attachments directly to your customer's inbox
    • 'Pull' - Website self-service portals: Offer registered customers a simple email notice in their inbox informing them that a bill is ready for online retrieval.

    Fact: Customer adoption rates for 'pull' self-service portals have stagnated and disappointed. 'Push'email delivery of secure bills and statements has increasingly succeeded in turning off paper and driving qualified customer traffic to biller websites through transpromo marketing.

    Transpromo Marketing

    All commercial emails can be personalized according to customer demographics, business drivers and marketing criteria. Striata's advanced profiling engine enables clients to include important promotional offers based on demographic (age, gender), psychographic (income bracket, purchase activity) and usage information, such as current product and service usage, length of service and billing address, as well as customer enquiry behavior.

    • Creates new marketing opportunities.
    • More cost effective than traditional paper bill stuffers.
    • Activity can be tracked.
    • billers are ultimately targeting an expressly interested audience.

    Transpromo Marketing - incorporating marketing offers within transactional emails - has proven to be an effective tool for many industries including insurance, cable and telecommunications, banks and lending services.

    eConsent

    Get your customers to say "Yes"! And go paperless in one click.

    Achieve significant adoption of paperless processes with minimal effort from your customer and the least amount of cost and time from your business. It only takes one click!

    Current scenario:

    • Billers want customers to go paperless.
      Problem: You've offered various incentives to entice customers to switch to paperless processes. None of which have achieved the desired results. Complex website registration processes and expecting customers to 'fetch' their documents from the portal are just some of the obstacles standing in the way of paperless adoption.
    • Customers don’t want to go through a registration process to go paperless.
      Fetching the document from an online portal that requires a username and password to login is also not as convenient as getting it in the post. When the alternative to paper is a hassle and nothing has to change, why should they?

    Reduce Billing Costs

    The cost saving potential of replacing paper bills and statements with electronic documents is undisputed. The primary challenge today in realizing these cost reductions, is encouraging customers to adopt paper turn off strategies.
    4 Reasons why customers do not turn off paper:
    1. It is more convenient to receive paper documents by mail than to search and fetch them from a website
    2. The paper version continues to be delivered so it's just easier to take no action
    3. Many consumers don't feel comfortable with technology
    4. Customers are concerned about phishing websites

    Delivering secure electronic documents to customers will drive significant customer adoption of your paperless strategy. Striata's Email Bill Presentment and Payment solution enables billers to achieve significant reductions in costs associated with paper bills and statements.



    Maximize Customer Adoption

    Why Striata's solution proves better adoption results than any other online billing product:
    Striata attaches the bill to an email and sends it directly to the customer.

    1. It adds the convenience factor to online billing and payment:

    Convenience and ease of use maximize paperless adoption.

    2. Provides easy, accessible payment options from within the eBill:

    Striata’s one click payment technology enables customers to make payment simply and safely from within the emailed bill. This makes the bill even more convenient than the paper it has replaced.

    Get Payments Faster

    Optimizing electronic billing processes can dramatically reduce your DSO by cutting the time it takes to get bills to your customers and to elicit payment.
    Benefits of email presentment and payment
    For the customer: more choice in payment options is perceived as an added convenience. The benefit of Striata's email presentment and payment solution is that it requires only one click to open the bill and one click to pay it. This process therefore eliminates the need to print out the bill, file it and set a reminder to pay it later. It is the ultimate in customer convenience.

    For the biller: offering the ability for payment from within the bill provides customers with an enhanced experience which maximizes ePayment adoption. Additionally, offering a wider range of payment options provides financial protection.


    Paper Turn Off

    The benefits of an effective paper turn off strategy:
    • Deliver rich electronic documents tobuild customer adoption of your online channel
    • Reduce the monetary and environmental costs of paper output by replacing paper documents with electronic versions
    • Email document delivery enables personalized marketing
    • Drive qualified web traffic

    Striata's tried and tested adoption strategies are proven to deliver paper turn off targets.

    Marketing Opportunities

    Examples of marketing real-estate enabled by Striata PUSH email billing
    • The email main body
    • Bill inserts
    • Payment confirmation emails
    • Splash pages and pop-up messages
    • Feedback Forms
    • Reporting

    Anti-Phishing Protection

    How to ensure your eStatements are safe:
    • Digitally sign all Statement emails to provide Sender authentication. Educate your customers to look for and check the digital certificate.
    • Remove links from your email.
    • Add an anti-phishing section to the cover emails that includes personalized data.
    • The anti-phishing section must also say – "never input your ATM pin number on a website".

    Teaching consumers to differentiate between a valid email and a fraudulent email is critical in the war against email phishing scams.

    Going Green

    Striata's Clients are realizing the paperless reality

    Consumers have demonstrated a high comfort level with email and a rising willingness to make online payments within branded, trusted online environments. What consumers have not demonstrated is a willingness to chase after their bills. Yet, this is exactly what billers seem to expect when they build an online payment site, without a sound, proven strategy on how to get customers to visit and pay their bills.

    Not surprising then that we have found paper turn off rates for customers signing up to view and pay their bills at biller websites, rarely rise above 5%per year. This is by all standards a failure. Many of our clients are billers who attempted this strategy first. However, with government, consumers and investors now scrutinizing your carbon footprint, there's no need to settle for such low adoption rates.

    eBilling is just one example of how environmentally correct strategies can be profitable. It all comes down to picking an eBilling strategy that drives user adoption.

    Notifications and Alerts

    How Striata's electronic notifications & alerts solution can benefit your business:
    • Instant, time sensitive delivery
    • Multi-medium alerting
    • Integrated response functionality 
    • Personalization, and targeted deliverability
    This sophisticated customer profiling technology allows a business to customize the delivery of notices, which can be:
    • Sent out over multiple mediums
    • Automated to be distributed to customers based on triggers
    • Targeted to select groups of customers based on profile data.
    • Lifecycle-based, triggered communications

    Credit and Collections

    Striata's electronic billing solution for credit & collections:
    • Reduces costs
    • Retains a larger portion of the original amount billed
    • Shortens the payment cycle
    • Improves biller cash flow
    • Provides an efficient, immediate way to reach delinquent customers
    • Reduces the number of customers falling into the credit and collections cycle
    • Sends additional reminders via mobile phone text messaging

    Striata has partnered with the leading payment processors in North America and can also rapidly configure the application to work with any existing payment processing system.

    B2B EIPP and eInvoicing

    Advantages of Striata's email invoice presentment and payment solution
    • eInvoices are delivered in both machine and human readable format.
    • No action is required by the business customer to receive the invoices.
    • Detailed 'invoice presentment and payment' can be delivered, without requiring a website visit.
    • Flexible output formats means invoice data capture is eliminated at the eInvoicing hub.
    • Disputed line items are easily, instantly and electronically managed. After dispute submission, re-invoicing is instant and automatic.
    • Payment can be made directly from the invoice - a securely encrypted email attachment - this is optional for the customer.
    • Multiple file types can be securely personalized, packaged, encrypted and compressed into a single email.
    • Incentive trade discounts, through early settlements are easily automated.

    eStatements

    Email eStatement Presentment provides significant, instant & measurable cost reduction from reduced paper output:
    • Significant savings
    • Fast, one click access to the eStatement
    • Ability to save and view
    • Mobile ready
    • Environmental benefits
    • Effective use of customer touch points
    • Low take-up costs
    • Support for corporate e-communication strategies 

    Transactional Messages

    What is a transactional email?
    A transactional email is automatically generated in response to an action. When someone interacts with an organisation there’s often a follow up communication sent by email. Some examples of transactional emails are:

    • a confirmation or failure notification
    • a payment receipt or an invoice
    • a booking form

    Striata can help you extract the maximum value from this existing channel through applying our expertise:
    • Design strategies
    • Applying email best practice
    • Value add strategies

    Striata BillPay

    With no registration required, Striata BillPay enables billers to gain maximum customer adoption, by taking their ePayment strategies to the consumer. Striata’s 'one-click', electronic payment capability is built into the eBill, allowing customers to make a bill payment directly from within the encrypted, emailed bill.
    Primary business drivers:
    • Instant bill delivery;
    • An enhanced customer experience;
    • Faster, electronic payment;
    • Higher ePayment adoption;
    • Personalized, targeted marketing.

    eAcceptance

    The process is made up of the following steps
    1. Each policy is encrypted and attached to a highly personalized and sender-authenticated email.
    2. Email and attachment are sent and inbox penetration assured.
    3. Recipient is not required to download any new software or have registered online.
    4. One-click to open and one-click to sign.
      1. Consumer receives this trusted email, opens the attachment by authenticating themselves through a ‘shared secret’. 
      2. Consumer confirms that the policy information is correct and ‘signs’ the document.
    5. This electronic signature is submitted through a secure internet connection and validated on the receiving side.
    6. The electronic signature is embedded within the policy and permanently locked.
    7. A copy of the final policy is encrypted and sent to the consumer via Striata Secure Document Delivery.
    8. The policy remains encrypted at all times.
    9. The original is uploaded to the insurer, along with the detailed audit trail.

    Striata ePIN

    PINs can be securely issued and managed over previously insecure mechanisms: email, the web and mobile networks, providing a wide range of benefits to both the cardholder and the card issuer, including the following:
    • No paper, print or postage administration
    • Delivery is not reliant on local mail postal methods
    • Enables the card holder to receive their PIN at their convenience
    • Provides proof of delivery of the PIN
    • Personalized marketing can be included as part of delivering the PIN
    • Excellent green credentials
    • Complies with requirements defined by Visa
    • Easily integrated alongside existing PIN issuance methods
    • Supports a number of security settings
    • High level of security - 256 bit AES encryption
    • Provides HSM data protection during transfer and for data at rest
    • Data confidentiality