Why deliver bills, pay stubs & invoices securely via email?
The mantra of interactive commerce remains - insert your content into your client's daily activity. This holds especially true in the eBill environment, where the inbox really is the mailbox of the 21st century.

There is no doubt that the inbox is the mailbox of the 21st Century. Studies by Gartner, Forrester and Meta group have all confirmed that most internet users open their inbox on a daily basis. It would make sense that the inbox would become the ultimate consolidator for personal communication and documents like monthly bills.

However, in the EBPP world, billers "deliver" their bills electronically by posting them on a website and sending an email notification to the customer. This is easy to do and convenient for the biller - but cumbersome and irritating to the customer. It would be more efficient to actually deliver the bill to the customer secure in an email, negating the need to go back to a website and fetch it. This has the added advantage of making the roll-out of e-billing very simple - one of the current drawbacks of existing EBPP solutions.

Email & online EBPP ('push' versus 'pull')
As a niche player in the Electronic Billing space, Striata is often approached to define the key differences between delivering documents securely via email and Internet Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment websites.

The two offerings provide both overlapping and unique benefits, sometimes to different customer segments. The most comprehensive Internet bill offering is the process that makes use of a combination of the two methods.

Historically, the emphasis has been on bill presentment websites. With the changing profile of online users, it is apparent that even those organizations with large bill presentment infrastructures, need to complement this process with a secure email offering.

Over 70% of Americans are using email regularly, yet less than 30% of US adults have tried viewing & paying bills online. In fact, in almost all industries & market verticals, adoption to online EBPP varies from less than 2% to only 15% of customers.

The key advantages of secure eBill delivery:
A fundamental benefit is the act of 'delivering' the bill to the customer, rather than requiring the customer to 'collect' the bill himself. Other advantages include:

    Adoption:
  • The bill is designed by the biller and can look exactly like the paper bill, though with additional interactive functionality. This familiarity with the biller's look-and-feel drives customer acceptance and adoption and makes the customer feel comfortable enough to opt-out of receiving the paper bill.
  • Email has become the digital communication channel of choice, which means the bill arrives in a frequently used application - the email inbox.
  • There is no upfront customer registration required. (A user-friendly opt-out process is part of any eBill offering). This significantly reduces the 'inertia' that hampers adoption rates.
  • There is no password or login management required as an existing password or shared secret is used to decrypt the eBill. (An advantage to both the biller & the customer.)
  • Billers, who do not yet have Internet EBPP or any other electronic billing services, can implement this solution as their first step to digital communication with their customers.
  • Billers, who are struggling to drive EBPP adoption rates, can utilize this solution to effectively reach significantly more customers.
  • The Striata eBilling Suite has negligible or no set-up costs. The take up of this offering is therefore almost totally risk free and easy to pilot.
  • The technology and solution are proven with over 60 existing large customers worldwide, and a 5 year history of successful implementations.
  • The solution is quick to implement. (Most implementations take less than 6 weeks to go live.)
    Convenience:
  • There is no need to be connected to the Internet to view the eBill once the eBill has downloaded. This is particularly relevant for dial up users which still account for 63% of all email users in the US.
  • The resulting email (with eBill attached) is typically less than 50kb, as high degrees of compression can be achieved.
  • There is no need to visit or navigate through a website to view the bill.
  • No multiple-step bill payment process necessary on the Internet. After receiving an email notice that a bill is available for viewing, customers must usually go through a 5 or 6-step process on the Internet to pay their bill. This is no longer necessary. Email bills can be paid within 30 seconds
  • Can be printed out and saved by the customer. IE, either the hard copy or digital copy can be saved by the customer. (The eBill is easy to save to your local computer for filing and future reference.)
  • The customer can still choose to pay the eBill by check or any other offline method. Certain customer segments will still prefer the traditional process.
  • eBill technology can also enable advanced functionality such as repayment calculators, contact details update forms, call-back request forms, cross-selling tools, and basic analysis - all available to the recipient offline, with the ability to submit information back to the Biller when the user is online again.
    Security:
  • The eBill remains encrypted on your local computer, protecting confidentiality.
  • The email is totally secure using the latest in encryption technology, PKI, Triple DES and Java.
  • Any security risk is confined to a single recipient's data and not an entire customer database in an EBPP website.
  • Three secure electronic payment options are available:
    • Payment directly from within the email.
    • Secure linking to an Internet payments page.
    • Secure linking to the biller's current online payment solution. (If they have one.)
    Marketing:
  • There are unique personalized marketing opportunities in the email body and within the eBill.
  • The eBill is actually a mini website delivered to the user's inbox - this facilitates other messaging and communication requirements and provides a channel for cross selling and up selling.
  • Marketing messages included in the eBill can be profiled per recipient, making the eBill the ultimate one-to-one marketing tool.
The Striata eBilling Suite - a leading secure email bill presentation and payment delivery solution
Striata specializes in the secure delivery of Bills, Statements, Invoices and Payslips via email. We have been a provider of secure electronic messaging solutions since 1999 and have offices in New York, London, Sydney and Johannesburg.