Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
The number of consumers who use biller Web sites to pay their bills continues to outpace the number who use bank sites, but the latter users are more active transactors, according to recent survey and online-tracking research from comScore Networks Inc. Overall, the online bill-pay market grew 36% in 2005, reaching 37 million active users compared to 27.5 million at year's end 2004, according to the Reston, Va.-based consumer-behavior research firm. The comScore survey shows that more than half of respondents now make online bill payments, owing chiefly to the continued penetration of broadband connections and the increasing comfort online users feel with the technology. However, the study also indicates that consumers' continued concerns about security are keeping a number of them from using online bill-payment systems. Some 48% of consumers cited this factor as the reason they don't pay bills online, making it the largest reason for non-use. So-called biller-direct sites, where consumers pay bills directly to utility companies and other merchants, continue to dominate online bill payment, with 31.8 million users at the end of 2005, up 35% over 2004. Users of online-banking sites to pay bills?bank Web sites where users can access their checking accounts to pay multiple billers at one time?reached 9.1 million, a 36% increase. Though the two camps are growing at the same rate (and apparently contain some overlap between them), the comScore report points out that users of online banking sites, with access to multiple billers at once, pay more bills than biller-direct users. These users make 14.6 transactions quarterly, compared to 4.7 for users of biller sites. Bank of America dominates the bank-site bill-payment market, the data show, with 5.1 million active users, or 56% of all users of bank sites to pay bills. Only two banks have been able to get more than 20% of their online users to pay bills. One is BofA, at 34%, while the other is Citigroup, at 37%. The report is based on data comScore derived from its tracking the online transactional behavior of more than 2 million consumers, as well as from a survey of 2,124 consumers conducted in March 2005.
