Comprehensive Payments

The challenge:
More than ever, consumers demand flexibility in how they use technology to transact business. This presents both opportunities and challenges for utilities that now need to build and maintain multiple billing and payment platforms to satisfy customers and leverage electronic processing savings. A trend toward declining paper volumes is also placing strain on utilities that manage remittance in-house. These trends are causing more and more utilities to consider outsourcing as a way to manage the costs and complexity of a multi-payment platform environment. Since 2002, the percentage of utilities outsourcing their bill remittance processing has more than doubled, and as the need for cross-platform integration increases, more companies are seeking a single vendor solution.

The service-with-software difference:
With service-with-software outsourcing, utilities can add meter-to-cash services that complement the CIS and business processes. First Data Utilities will manage and integrate the services, insulating utilities from the service integration headache.

By selecting a Comprehensive Payments service, utilities are able to provide their customers with payment flexibility, speed transaction clearing and operation simplicity with one integrated payment solution. Advanced services incorporate the latest imaging technologies to save on processing costs and speed transaction clearing while also integrating reporting and exception handling across platforms, giving a single view of your payments history.