While customer adoption rates for self-service portals have disappointed, email delivery of secure bills and statements has been extremely successful at driving qualified customer traffic to biller websites.

For billers tasked with online bill pay targets, the vision was never a mere reduction in billing costs, but rather the ability of a billing platform in an online environment to drive customers to their web based services, while reducing paper output and associated billing expenses.

Unfortunately this web based bill presentment and payment strategy has not resulted in the anticipated reduced 'cost to serve' through electronic payment and paper suppression, nor has it fulfilled strategic web portal targets.