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Responding to consumers’ growing use of digital options for bill payment, ACI Worldwide Inc. announced Monday that it is integrating PayPal and Venmo acceptance into its Speedpay bill-payment service.
The Monroe County Water Authority, which provides water to hundreds of thousands of customers over parts of six counties in the Rochester, N.Y., area, is one of the first ACI clients to accept PayPal. The water authority plans to add Venmo due to high demand for digital bill-payment options, ACI says.
“As consumer demand for more digital-payment options, including digital-wallet payment methods and the ability to pay in increments or at a later date, has increased in the bill-payments sector, we can conveniently meet our customers’ evolving needs” by offering offer PayPal and Venmo, Felicia Romagnolo, manager of customer services for the Monroe County Water Authority, said in a prepared statement.
ACI Speedpay, which includes mobile-wallet billing, payment, and notification capabilities, is used by a variety of billers across a range of sectors, including consumer finance, government, education, health care, insurance, telecommunications and cable, subscriptions, and utilities.
Despite the easing of the Covid-19 pandemic, which helped fuel an overall rise in digital payments, consumers continue to embrace digital options for bill payment, according to ACI.
A recent ACI Speedpay Pulse study reveals that 56% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers surveyed would consider paying a bill with a digital payment method such as Venmo or PayPal if the option were presented.
“For too long, paying bills has been a cash or check process that is inherently inefficient and costly to both consumers and billers. The past year and the increased digitization of commerce has shown the value digital wallets can provide, not just to retailers, but also to billers and other service providers,” Dan Leberman, senior vice president of partnerships at PayPal Holdings Inc. said in a prepared statement. “Our work with ACI … is an important step for us to not just digitize the bill-pay industry, but provide a trusted digital wallet for its customers and, ultimately, the billers’ consumers.”
In addition, digital bill payment is a more cost-effective option for billers, ACI argues. “When you factor in check imaging, envelopes, mailing, postage, personnel resources (finance/reconciliation/mail room), and paper checks, costs add up and can run [five to 10] times higher than digital payments. For billers running hundreds of thousands of payments annually, those costs are significant,” an ACI spokesperson says by email.
