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I'm okay with the decision to extend the life of cheques in the UK - there seem to be various groups (mostly charities) that rely on this payment medium and would suffer without it.

But this shows how hard it is to change customer behaviour. The eBilling industry has been trying to move people from paper to electronic delivery for over 10 years. 

What the banks proposed was a cut off by when those using cheques would have to make other arrangements. I venture that had this cut off date been upheld, the groups would have been forced to evolve their business processes and find new and innovative ways of maintaining the payments streams. But this would have been painful.

What I do think should now happen is that the costs of maintaining the cheque processing infrastructure should be assigned directly to the accounts using the medium - hence slowly forcing companies using this outdated instrument to look for more cost effective payment processes.

Unless the economical impact of the diminishing volume and hence increased average costs are passed directly onto the users we'll never become truly digital.

Richard:

I agree that banks should do more - however I'm worried that consumers will cede their responsibility to the banks and reduce their vigilance if they think that the banks will catch fraudulent activity on their behalf.

Mike

The interesting thing about what you describe is that you wish to have flexibility in the format of your eBills. Your personal choice could be an internet banking portal - yet someone else may wish to use their inbox.

What this requires is the adoption of an eBilling address space - something that has been the topic of discussion in eBilling and e-Invoicing circles for a while.

Using a dedicated email address for your ebills would allow you to route these type of communications to a specific inbox. Billers can email the documents (probably in multi-layered PDF fromat) very simply.

At the same time you may decide to route some bills to your internet banking bill manager - by giving the biller a dedicated email address for your banking portal (i.e. accountnumber@bankname.com). Again these bills can be emailed to that address (or transfered in bulk by FTP) in multi-layered PDF and the bank can read the XML data and display the bills appropriately.

Consumer eBilling needs to find the address space that will work in all situations and that can start now and scale as people move from paper to electronic document delivery.

Michael Wright - CEO - Striata

Hi Antti,

Your last line is the most pertinant, "who will watch the watchers" is always the biggest question.

I think that the concept that you are describing has been envisaged by many security start-ups. The problem is critical mass for one solution to become the dominant one - in a market where the entry price for new ideas and software is "free".

In my world, one the major reasons the adoption of eBilling is so low is that people can't remember a different username and password for each eBilling website. We advocate the use of encrypted attachments sent by email - effectively using the users inbox as one factor and a shared secret as another. Security architects understand that it's not perfect but it's very practical.

regards

Michael Wright - CEO | Striata

Stanley,

I certainly agree with large parts of your experience, the use of email for delivering bills and statements is a fast, efficient and cost effective mechanism - indeed we have built a global business on this model.

What you are experiencing is unfortunately not new - inbox placement (as opposed to just 'delivery') is now a crucial part of the email billing landscape.

This means that using email as your delivery method for invoices is no longer a mixture of an art and a science but a specialist skill that requires fulltime attention and the use of specialist tools to ensure the desired end result.

Greylisting, blacklisting, tarpitting, RBL, spam filters, priority inbox placement etc - all need to be overcome to ensure your cash flow doesn't suffer.

A simple way of changing this game is to get your clients to create a new eBilling email address - something that is not commonly used and is difficult to guess. They should then only use this address for all incoming email bills - ensuring that it is not exposed on their website or used for anything but bills - this makes it simplier to process the electronic invoices as they come in as they are all in the same place.

If you are still struggling, we have a wealth of information on this topic on our website.

regards

Michael Wright - CEO - Striata

As someone who is asked about these costs regularly - I think that Jon may be on the high side of some of the numbers. 

But even if the numbers are in reality 50% of the totals above these are still heftly costs for any business to bare.

For most of our clients, reducing the Days Sales Outstanding by 1 day will immediately pay back their electronic billing investment. However we are able to show that the costs saving on the postage alone makes the ROI less than 6 months.

@Ketharaman - There will always be a segment of a customer base that wants paper for various reasons - and you may fall into that segment for you own reasons but let's look at each one:

• Our clients realise that they can turn off paper if they provide assurance that when paper is needed it can be easily obtained. We add a "send in post please" button at the end of the eStatement. This means customers can always get the paper and allows them to switch to eStatements with confidence.
• I agree that the process of registering and logging into a website is time consuming but clicking on an email attachment and entering your date of birth is just as simple as opening an envelop and has zero risk of a paper cut.
• Some PDF products allow the use of a highlighter on screen - but I concede that a yellow highlighter on paper is the best in this instance. 

@Kurt - Good point - many banks substitute a transactional history for the paper statement - which is not the same thing. 

However a bank statement is not a good proof of address - banks rely on utilities for their KYC requirements and hence the use of any statement as an indication of where one lives is very tenuous.

Everyone is relying on someone else and if the weakest link is proved incorrect the whole chain comes tumbling down like a house of cards.

Striata has been very successful in applying the opt-out process to the adoption of B2C eBilling. This is mostly because we follow a "push" methodology of sending the billing documents directly to the customer via secure email attachments.

Opt-out is very difficult when you ask the customer to come back to a website and register or login to receive their bills.

Opt-out should have a really easy to use opt-out process. Not hard to do.

I believe that O2 are appealing the ComReg decision.

Is this really Two-Factor authentication? From the article it sounds like Two-Password authentication. 

I always understood "Factors" to be methods - hence Two-Factor would be 2 methods - generally something you know and something you have - the "know" and "have" being the factors.

If the aim is to make Citi harder to defraud than other banks, I think there is more work to be done.