Target Skill:

Define Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) from the biller and the customer point of view 

What Customers and Billers Want

The effort to implement EBPP depends on customer acceptance. Privacy for personal information is a key concern for Internet users, who tend to be a bit touchy about any effort to gather and use personal information. Any possibility that their information could be obtained without their consent would doom an EBPP solution. Internet users are getting more comfortable with payment through credit cards, especially with the widespread deployment of SSL. However, consumers expect to be successful paying their bills every time and will not tolerate errors or incomplete transactions. They also expect to save time using an Internet-based system.  They want to control the format of their bills and choose the web sites where they are available.

The needs of billers for EBPP are different from those of customers. The organizations most interested in EBPP generate millions of bills each month, so scalability is a key concern. Billers require a “critical mass” of online users to justify the start-up costs and ongoing maintenance. The EBPP system must be massively scalable to accommodate a large percentage of users migrating to online payment. 

An EBPP system must be ready to grow and adapt to organizational and product changes and to respond to consumer demand. Billers need to integrate EBPP with their current billing systems so they don’t have problems reconciling the two systems. The EBPP system must also ensure reliability, privacy, and data integrity, which are the responsibility of the biller.


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