Weblog

Saturday September 02, 2006

Bill payment systems

In the USA, a suprisingly large number of bills need to be paid by cheque (not check) and even large utilities like PG&E are unable to accept bill payments vis the Internet using credit cards, rather they need bank account information to deduct the money from.

Come on guys...this is the 21st century...get with the program and make it easy for your customers to pay their bills (electronic or otherwise) using whatever form of payment is convenient for the customer. Disclosing bank account details feels very bad to me.

Even with bank account details PG&E claim it will take 3 days to process the payment. Wow. What are they doing, printing out the details you submit electronically, sending them to your bank and then the bank verifies the cheque? Come on! You can be more efficient than this!

Maybe in Australia I got spoilt - paying utilities by credit card and be able to verify the next day that the payment had been made - electronically of course.

But then maybe things in the USA are structured around the concept of pork barelling, where rather than try and run the leanest, meanest and most competitive operation, utilities continue to be fat pigs that are inefficient and lazy?

I wonder how companies like PG&E would change if you could pick up the phone and call Sierra-Pacific Power or Southern California Edison and say "I want you to be electricity provider, starting tomorrow."