eBills should be like iTunes: anywhere, anytime, any device

I love the idea of "eBills should be like iTunes: anywhere, anytime, any device". However I think it should go one step futher than just email vs. portal delivery. Recipients should be able to access their bills on their own terms - i.e. In any medium i.e. Paper; Online (Portal); Offline (email or App) or device such as PC; Tablet or mobile. Also to get true reach, a soluton, should allow practically any mobile to view a bill. From entry level to feature phone to smart phone. This means not relying on PDF or email in a lot of cases - as some entry level and feature phones just cannot use these delivery and viewing methods. Even Smartphones do not handle PDF's that well  -the user experience is a scroll around and zoom in/out afair. This any bill anywhere concept means that markets such as Africa and China are now accessible.

I notice how this and a few other recent Finextra articles on eBills begin with with "paperless" and jump quickly to discussing the advantages of one form of eBill ("eBill via Email") over another ("eBill via Portal"). Makes me wonder if these two eBill camps have given up on fighting paper bills altogether and have instead decided to spar against each other. On second thoughts, that's not such a bad move. After all, paper bills don't seem to be going away even a decade after they were introduced. According to a Forrester report I remember reading sometime back, ebill adopters - via email and portals alike - are outnumbered by over 1:2 by non-adopters comprising Holdouts, Fence-Sitters and Quitters. Double-dippers only exacerbate the situation.

At the most basic level, bills are a necessary evil regardless of the form in which they reach me. On the other hand, music is a delight whether I listen to it on vinyl or MP3 or any other form in between. Therefore, I must be pardoned if I simply don't get the connection between bills and music / iTunes.   

Thank you both for your comments, and I agree to a large extent with both of you.

Alan: I know that with a large portion of your target audience in Africa, smartphone and high speed internet penetration isn't where the more developed geographies are. A multi-faceted approach that takes all "user-types" into account is always required, regardless of demongraphics. In fact, consumer segmentation is a critical element of Striata client success. We even segment smartphone users into several groups in order to target them with different messages. As our colleague Ketharaman points out, paper isn't going away at the rate anyone (least of all the ever optimistic analysts) had expected. My point is that in order for billers to see the quickest ROI, they need to align the majority of their efforts and resources on converting the low hanging fruit and appealing to the widest "electronically enabled" audience.

Ketharaman: Very astutely, you've picked up that eBilling models are to some extent competing against each other. I believe this has developed more out of the disappointment of portal-based eBill adoption rates than true competition. Striata's PUSH email billing clients average 2 to 3 times the industry adoption rates.

In most cases, the consumer decides how they would like to receive their bills, with apathy for change (or fear of change) undoubtedly the winner at this point.

If you sign up for a new service and are informed that they don't do paper bills, how likely are you to rethink your relationship with that company? 

My position is that the battle against paper bills needs to be won with the consumer, by making the switch incredibly simple, the new process significantly better than paper, and then giving them access no matter what electronic device they're on - including non smartphones as Alan suggests.

Our experience is that all billers are at various phases of desperation in terms of trying reduce print and postage. The "iTunes for everyone" concept is about maximium convenience, distribution and therefore significantly higher paper elimination.

@Barrie A: 

Appreciate your candid view re. paper v. paperless. I've written a couple of posts on Finextra and my personal blog and most recently commented on a post by Keith Russell to explain my preference for printed bills and ePayment.

To answer your specific questions:

1. As I've said in my previous posts and comments, consumer apathy is just one impediment to faster adoption of eBills; friction (e.g. password), regulation (e.g. KYC), etc. are more to blame.
2. When I select a service provider, it doesn't matter at all whether the service provider offers eBills or only printed bills. 
3. On the other hand, if an existing service provider sending me printed bills forces a paper-turnoff on me, I'll threaten to drop them. Both events keep happening regularly!  
4. Due to DRM, I've heard from users of iPhone + iPad - I myself use Android - that content (e.g. Kindle eBook) purchased for one platform doesn't work on the other. Therefore, while I appreciate your vision to make a bill available on any device of the customer's choice, I'm still not so sold on the eBills-iTunes analogy.

To fuel the fire about Print, Pull and Push, I've posted a blog about what adoption targets are realistic for 2012.

https://www.finextra.com/blogs/fullblog.aspx?blogid=6344

@Ketharaman

iPad users have become used to the idea of not being able to access flash websites. Mobile phone users have come to realize that trying to navigate a poorly designed online bill pay website is just not a convenient or doable experience except in times of desperation.

The one common denominator on all internet-enabled devices is email, which makes it the most powerful electronic delivery channel. Striata's interactive PDFs have been exhaustively tested on all major devices with success. A PDF provides a level of consistency on almost any device. This consistency and a significantly better user experience than what most consumers have access to today are critical to increasing adoption.

You are never going to satisfy everyone all of the time, but the overall point of my blog was to deliver the best and most consistent user experience to the largest possible customer audience. Right strategy, right technology.

@Barrie A:

Appreciate your taking the time out to reply. Amidst all the buzz around Twitter and other social media, it's easy to forget the importance of email. While email continues to be a powerful electronic delivery channel, my point is simply that it's not suitable for eBills / eStatements - for reasons mentioned in my previous posts and comments.

To make a customer visit a portal only to view an eBill is not great UX. On the face of it, sending it by email seems better UX. However, coming to think of it, people visit portals for checking account balance, making payment, transferring money and to perform many other activities. While I'm no fan of this approach, I've to concede that there's no friction in viewing an eBill or downloading an eStatement during one such visit - especially when combined with the fact that they don't need a separate password just for viewing eBills on the portal.

I'm sure Striata and other vendors can implement their eBill-by-email solutions without passwords but, in reality, many billers do insist on passwords and that is a major source of friction.  

@ Ketharaman

1. Based on your very educated responses on the topic, my guess is that you fall into a very small category of users (about 2%), rather than representing the majority. Our experience is that the vast majority of consumers don't analyze the options as deeply as you, if at all. Usually the decision is made within a couple of seconds at most: Should I go paperless, how many bills / statements a year am I getting from this provider, how complicated is the sign-up process, what's in it for me - or alternatively - they're switching me to paperless; should I make the effort to switch back? The key is to eliminate the enrollment process, and give the consumer a better experience than paper, with the ability to swtich back at any point.

2. I read a Forrester report which determined that in the US less than half of eStatement customers are completely paperless. Coupled with the plateau effect of eStatement adoption that most banks are experiencing and there MUST been a better way than online presentment. But more importantly, and to your point, you're already logging in to online banking several times a month to check balances, transfer funds etc. What about all the BILLERS? Insurance, auto-loan, mortgage, utility, cable etc. where the need to log-in really doesn't exist. Paper works just fine: consumer apathy is the biggest enemy.

This is exactly why a PUSH email "delivery" model (to reiterate)complements the portal strategy by specifically targeting paper customers with a statement that comes to them, rather than reqiring them to "fetch" it. There is no registration, no username or password and consumers can view a history of all bills by logging in to the full portal, thus driving more revenue generating and self-service traffic to the website.

Rather than passwords, shared secrets should be used to decrypt bills and statements, offering significantly greater convenience to the recipient while maintaining the security levels required by banks and billers.

One of the problems with the Internet Banking strategy for saving your documents is that these are then lost if you move banks.

I recently moved countries and closed a few old bank accounts that I didn't need anymore. However before I closed the account I had to log in and download all the records to my computer for personal storage.

As soon as I closed the account access to my financial history was cut off.

It is much better to be in control of your own document storage. I'm eyeing the new services from Doxo and Manilla etc, but having used a similar solution in the past that ran out of VC cash and closed down - I'm not so sure I want to put all my financial info at the mercy of someone else's cash flow.

@Barrie A:

I agree that my comments about portal were implicitly applicable only in the case of banks. Thank you for calling it out. I also agree with your point about billers like MNO, Utility, Councils and other nonbank billers: Barring a few occasions (e.g. check data usage, NAV, etc.), I find little reason to visit the biller's portal. Having said that, I notice that all these billers do have portals, so I'm not sure if mine is 2% or majority behavior.

In my experience, at least 50% of the billers do insist on passwords. So many bills, so many shared secrets, not easy to remember which shared secret is applicable for which bill. So, shared secrets pose no less friction. 

If, as you say, the average customer only gives 2 seconds of thought to decide whether to adopt eBills or not, then, IMHO, vendors need to raise their messaging to new heights or risk encountering continued consumer apathy. After so much analysis, if I'm unable to find a compelling reason to switch to eBills, I wonder if the result of a 2-second analysis will be any different.