We Have a Bill Portal - Why Do We Need Document Consolidation?

Customers want to view and pay their bills online, but they don’t always have a choice in how to do it. Using the most common model, customers log into their accounts to access bills, statements, explanations of benefits, and other documents via a portal hosted by the billing organization. But the user experience (UX) isn’t always optimal.

One thing influencing the UX is the way people pay their bills. Customers seek more convenience than the biller-direct model provides. More people are paying their bills via credit cards or the Automated Clearing House (ACH) system. Some companies allow payments through Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Venmo. Online payments expedite transactions directly from checking or savings accounts. Customers don’t need to visit bank branches so much anymore and they don’t write many checks.

Over the past several years, many consumers have defected to online payment and presentment services. These third-party bill payment providers such as Prism, Quicken, MyCheckFree, and Paytrust, target younger adults with mobile apps that centralize bill management in a single location. Consumers also benefit from the ability to:

• Schedule bill payments and set up alerts/reminders
• View statements and see detailed transaction histories, rather than simply balances due
• Dispute charges that look sketchy or they don’t recognize
• See confirmations that payments posted to their account

Consumers want their bills paid on time, of course, but they also want more control over the timing and mix of payment options. They want to see their financial picture all at once, not in small pieces reported on each biller website. Some users find the process cumbersome, especially those making a lot of purchases with a slew of bills to pay.

Customers find the biller-direct method of financial management to be overly time-consuming. They dislike having to log in and choose an option for every single bill. Plus, there are those dreaded, repeated password recovery attempts, which are often frustrating cases of forgetting what we can’t remember. Not to mention security questions and two-factor authentications.

People Prefer Choices

Is your goal to convert as many customers as possible to paperless billing? If your company already uses a traditional biller-direct portal, why would it need to offer document consolidation? The short answer is that many end-users are seeking more benefits. That’s why many corporations, educational institutions, and government agencies are considering offering the choice of a consolidation site, which may better fit their customer’s organizational needs for document presentment.

End-users like options and choices. Think of consolidating bills as a supplement, not as a substitute to the biller-direct portal. A solution that offers customers more benefits may be the strategy that can move the needle and convince more customers to make the switch to electronic billing.

Popular bill-consolidation sites, such as Prism, MyCheckFree, and FileThis, closed down recently. Customers were frustrated, as expressed in this Reddit quote from a FileThis customer:

“FileThis has been really helpful over the years for automatically downloading bank statements, utility bills, and the like. Does anyone know of any alternatives?”

And this one concerning Prism:

“... I really don't want to have to go to every website, log in and pay for all my bills. Plus it's so nice knowing how much money is coming out, week to week.”

Companies can deliver much of the same convenient bill-management features customers enjoyed with their now-defunct bill-pay accounts by automatically posting bills to Cubby Paperless. Cubby’s unique approach to bill presentment avoids the logistical pitfalls that plagued many of those apps that have disappeared. Offering customers an alternative to the biller-direct portal will improve the UX for many customers and encourage them to abandon paper bills.