Mobile bill payments register considerable growth - report

According to a recent research titled “A Comprehensive View of Mobile Billing and Payment: Consumer Behavior and Preferences and Billers Strategies and Deployments,” commissioned by Fiserv, a global provider of financial services technology solutions, almost 1 in 5 visits to a billers website come from a mobile device, which represents a 55% increase over 2013. Of those visits, bill payment is the number one consumer activity. Despite the growing use of the mobile channel, only 16% of billers have implemented a mobile bill pay and presentment (MBPP) strategy.

The study argues that there is a definitive link between mobile bill payments and an increase in customer satisfaction and paperless e-bill adoption, in which an electronic version of a bill replaces the mailed paper version. Billers offering MBPP saw a 44% greater e-bill adoption rate since 2013, compared to billers that did not offer the same functionalities. Those offering alerts and notifications had a 47% increase in e-bill adoption compared to billers that did not.

Furthermore, the report notes that billers face several barriers to implementing an MBPP strategy even though they see the added benefits. When asked to name their top three obstacles, 76% responded it is a challenge to provide the necessary IT resources, while 54% said conflicting priorities in their organization was an obstacle. Security concerns were cited by 43%, rising 16% over the prior year. This is most likely a result of high-profile payment card security breaches and concerns about managing solutions for an increasing number of devices and operating systems as the mobile market expands, the research concludes.