BROOKFIELD, Wis. — A scant few years ago, online bill pay was being touted as the next killer app by some in the credit union community, dismissed as tech fantasy by others.
The latest in CheckFree's sponsored series of surveys, however, shows that channel has become even more solidly mainstream.
For the second year in a row, American consumers who go online now pay more bills online than they do by paper check, and about three-fourths of American households, about 63.1 million of them, pay bills that way now, according to the survey of 3,031 online households by Harris Interactive.
And concerns about how online bill pay works (15%) have replaced security concerns (13%) as the most-cited barrier to adoption, the survey found.
The survey found that an estimated 31.0 million households are using online banking Web sites to pay bills, 47.9 million households are using biller Web sites and 16 million are using both to receive and pay bills.
Online bill payments made at both bank and biller Web sites rose to 42% of the total volume of household bill payments made each month, up from 39% in the 2007 survey. That compares to 14% in the first survey in 2002.
"As more consumers gain experience and become more comfortable using the Internet, their confidence in online security grows and we see an increase in the adoption of online banking and bill payment services," said Todd Lesher, division president of CheckFree Electronic Banking Services, now part of Fiserv.
–mrapport@cutimes.com
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