More consumers than ever are willing to change how they pay their bills, in pursuit of greater convenience, and payment experiences that better fit their daily lives.
That’s one of the key findings in our latest ACI Speedpay Pulse survey of consumer bill pay behaviors and preferences. This has manifested itself specifically as a sharp rise in the adoption of mobile wallets, which are riding a wave of increased familiarity with – and trust in – digital channels.
58 percent of mobile wallet users now report making a payment at least once a week, compared to 46 percent a year ago. In terms of paying bills, 49 percent would consider using a mobile wallet to pay bills, compared to 36 percent in 2021 (28% in 2018).
For billers, this readiness to adopt mobile wallets presents several opportunities. It is a chance to bring down costs by hastening paperless billing adoption. It is also an opportunity to provide better digital experiences that drive improved customer satisfaction.
This is exactly what one Fortune 500 energy services holding company was able achieve, which – with the help of ACI Worldwide – enabled customers to view and pay their bills via Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.
1.2 million new mobile wallet bills delivered in 2021
The utility company was looking to expand its digital payment options via smartphone wallet apps in order to increase paperless adoption. It believed the move would provide more choice and convenience while furthering the company’s customer-first and digital engagement strategies.
The solution was simple: add ACI Walletron mobile wallet bill presentment capability to its existing ACI Speedpay solution. This allowed it to quickly and easily enable customers to leverage the native Apple Wallet and Google Wallet apps on their phones, to both pay and view their bills without needing a username or password.
The results have been swift and significant. Within the first month of launching ACI Walletron, overall paperless adoption increased by 1,700 customers. As of February 2022, ACI Walletron adoption reached 6.8 percent, representing 80,925 customers. The volume of new mobile wallet bills delivered in 2021 reached 1.2 million, helping the company achieve a savings of $160,000 on bill delivery costs. And their position in the J.D. Power Gas Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study has also improved, showing growth in both the Billing and Payment Index and Overall Customer Satisfaction.
According to the organization’s VP of Customer Experience, this incredible rate of adoption has been critical to driving the company’s digital customer experience agenda.
“For our base, those that wanted to go digital had already done so. We needed to provide a reason to more of our customer base to go digital, and ACI Walletron was just that incentive.”
Smooth implementation and deployment
Throughout the project, ACI and the customer’s business and tech teams worked closely together to achieve a smooth implementation and deployment.
“The experience with ACI has just been terrific,” said the VP of Customer Experience. “We have been a long-term partner, but we needed ACI to be able to integrate with our customer information systems that are more than 40 years old. ACI was able to do this seamlessly, and more importantly, reliably. This is extremely important to our customers. And the speed to deployment was so fast.”
Coupled with the expansion of its paperless (My Account) and email (eBill) options, the utility company now offers customers a truly digital-first experience. To help drive further adoption, they created a series of self-service videos to help customers understand the ease of signing up. Now they are exploring opportunities to use text capabilities to give customers an easier way to sign up digitally, part of its “Text To” initiative.
This utility company has shown the power of convenient, on-demand, digital-first experiences – and is enjoying all the benefits of being an early adopter. Learn more about how ACI Worldwide can transform utility payment processing.
ACI Speedpay 
