AT&T Aims to Ring up Savings with e-Bills Via CheckFree Banks

Hoping to cut its paper-bill costs, AT&T Inc. has quietly made electronic bill payment available to its AT&T Mobility mobile-device customers that have deposit accounts with the more than 3,000 financial institutions that use the e-bill services of bank processor Fiserv Inc.'s CheckFree subsidiary. AT&T Mobility, formerly Cingular Wireless, and CheckFree turned on e-billing through CheckFree's financial-institution platform about four months ago, though the companies didn't publicize the service outside of AT&T's customer base until earlier this month. Dallas-based AT&T has offered online biller-direct payment services for at least seven years, according to Brian Daly, director of payment strategy and operations for AT&T Mobility. Previously, it was possible for a motivated customer to pay his AT&T cell-phone bill through his bank's online site if he had AT&T's merchant number, but the resulting e-bill relied on so-called “scraping” technology that pulled only the minimal information needed for payment, such as amount due. Now, an AT&T Mobility customer can easily go on to his bank's online-banking site, pull up full AT&T Mobility bill details, and pay. “We have made the user experience much stronger, and we have controlled the errors and exceptions that happen as a result of the scraping,” says Patrick Howard, a CheckFree director. Some 250,000 of AT&T's 1.5 million customers who have accounts at CheckFree's client institutions are already using the service, according to Daly. “We're trying to get that [250,000] up as close to a million and a half as we can,” he says. He adds that each monthly paper bill converted to an e-bill saves AT&T between 50 cents and $1. AT&T customers made nearly 85 million online bill payments in 2006 and more than 92 million in 2007, an 8.2% increase, according to an AT&T/CheckFree release. Customers can continue to get paper bills for three months as they transition into full electronic bill payments. A CheckFree spokesperson says CheckFree delivered 73.6 million e-bills through its bank and biller-direct networks during the second quarter. Through the first six months of 2008, CheckFree delivered 145 million e-bills, up 22% over the year-earlier period. Howard says bill payments through financial-institution sites are growing twice as fast as biller-direct payments.