Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment

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What Does Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment Mean?

Electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) is a process that allows the creation and delivery of bills or invoices as well as facilitates the payment for those invoices over the Internet. The process or service is primarily used in industries such as retail, financial services, telecommunications service providers and even utilities providers.

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Contrary to popular belief, EBPP is not the same as E-commerce or buying items over the Internet.

Techopedia Explains Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment

Buying items over the Internet has become extremely popular because this use case is very easy to implement over the Internet and it has been made secure by various protocols. However, viewing bills such as credit card bills and utility bills are not yet that widespread, even though there are facilities that cater to this; most people simply either do not know about this or are more comfortable with paper billing. So, although bills can be viewed online, there are often very few ways to pay them, if at all. In this way, EBPP is still incomplete.

During past decades, banks have partnered with different financial and service companies to allow customers to pay their bills online through a bank’s specific online facility; that is, if the customer has an account with the bank. This is more of a ploy to get people to open a bank account than actual EBPP. Real EBPP should be done through a single facility directly controlled by the organization that does the actual billing, and it should be very similar to E-commerce, which is very simple and allows the user to choose from many methods of payments.

The growth of EBPP has mainly been delayed by financial organizations, such as banks, owing to their refusal to relinquish control of lucrative cash-management services and to disputes over the adoption of a uniform security and implementation standard.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.