70% of Billing Execs Link Digitized Payment Systems With Improved Customer Satisfaction

Consumer finance companies — such as banks, credit unions (CUs), and auto and mortgage lenders — that focus on efficiently delivering better customer experiences know where they should make their investments to drive growth and can offer insights to businesses in other industries.

The greatest share of billing executives and payments executives at these companies said they believe that a key benefit that digitizing payments systems can bring to their businesses is higher customer satisfaction.

Ninety-seven percent said they expect that to be an impact of bill payment innovation, according to “The Digital Payments Edge,” a PYMNTS and ACI Worldwide collaboration based on a survey of 104 billing and payments executives at consumer finance companies that send more than 40,000 customer bills each month.

Get the report: The Digital Payments Edge

Other key benefits that the billing executives said digitizing payments systems can bring to their businesses are gaining a competitive edge (cited by 92% of the executives), greater operational efficiency (91%), growth in new customers (87%), reduced collection times (87%), cost reductions (82%) and more targeted collections (82%).

The biggest hurdle preventing them from furthering that digitization is a lack of technology, with 68% of the billing executives citing that factor.

Other factors inhibiting their continued innovation in billing and payments digitization include employees without the necessary technical skills (cited by 60% of the executives), insufficient resources (40%), high cost of innovation (37%) and insufficient attention from management (21%).

Consumer finance companies that successfully leverage their digitized platforms to continue improving billing processes will better position themselves to meet customer expectations, boost loyalty and enhance their competitive positions.

These outcomes will also be increasingly important as competition intensifies in the consumer finance industry and more providers step forward with innovative services and payments platforms.