The growing popularity of e-bill: 300,000th user registered

E-bill is growing ever more popular: The 300,000th user mark was exceeded in November 2008. According to a UBS survey, 40% of Swiss bank customers are familiar with e-bill. Additional billers have introduced the e-bill. The Canton of Basel-Stadt (Basel-Stadt Real Estate) is the first Swiss canton to offer e-bill to its citizens.

“E-bill is making headway because people are talking about the advantages it offers," agree both Martin Frick, CEO of SIX Paynet Ltd and Jürg Bucher, Head of PostFinance, whose companies operate the e-bill systems. “Anyone who has received a bill electronically per computer and paid it with just a mouse click is convinced by e-bill.”

The success of e-bill is also demonstrated by the growing number of billers that have decided for e-billing. The number of billers has increased to around 200 companies in the past year. Switzerland’s largest billers – Swisscom, Sunrise and Billag – have long since offered the option of e-billing. They were joined in November by additional health insurance companies, public utilities and additional publishing houses (Editions Le Nouvelliste SA and Südostschweiz Medien). The public administration sector is now getting involved: The Canton of Basel-Stadt is the first Swiss canton to offer its citizens the option of receiving and paying bills electronically. For the present, e-bill is available for the Real Estate Department in Basel-Stadt.

The point has been reached in which users can switch a major portion of recurring bills from paper billing to electronic billing. To make the switch they need only register once at the e-banking portal of their bank or PostFinance, by selecting those billers from which they would like to receive bills electronically in the future and pay per mouse click under the “e-bill" menu item. Some billers reward the switch to e-bill: For example, those who sign up for e-billing for the telecommunications provider Orange by the end of April 2009 shall receive a gift of 100 call minutes.

The increasing popularity of e-bill is also reflected in a survey conducted by UBS. It shows that familiarity with e-bill increased from 27% to 41% between 2007 and 2008(1). Among people aged 25 to 39 years old, 50% are familiar with e-bill, while the figure is 29% among people over 55 years old.

(1) 2008 survey of familiarity with e-bill among Swiss bank customers, UBS Market Research & Analysis; telephone interviews (CATI) among 1078 bank customers in German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland, aged 25 to 70 years old.