Friday, October 19, 2007

Outlook 2007 a challenge for e-marketers

Electronic messaging specialist Striata is advising digital marketers to increase planning and testing of e-mail marketing campaigns, following the release of Outlook 2007. According to Mia Papanicolaou, head of e-marketing at Striata, the enhancements included in the new Outlook version do have an impact on e-mail marketing campaigns.

Papanicolaou stresses that marketers should be aware of the new requirements for successfully displaying their communications in Outlook 2007. She indicates as an example, that Outlook 2007 does not display forms such as surveys in the same way as previous versions, and that animated gifs (used for creative effect) will appear as static images.

"What appears in a customer's Outlook 2007 inbox could be different to what the marketer intended if not tested correctly, and therefore the anticipated response or participation levels may be skewed. The end result is that the e-mail campaign does not reach its targeted conversion levels."

Striata recommends conducting extensive testing of e-mails through Outlook 2007, using various coding practices in order to gain a fuller perspective of the impact the new software version has on e-mail presentation.

"Because digital marketing is such a dynamic environment, this kind of testing will be an ongoing exercise for marketers and their service providers," says Papanicolaou. "As an e-marketing agency, it is our responsibility to monitor the effects of new software versions and to manage the possible adverse impacts on the effectiveness of the campaign."

A digital marketing veteran, Papanicolaou adds that there are many tricks to control the execution of an e-mail campaign, even when the 'goalposts keep moving' at the technology level. "For example, to conduct a survey using e-mail, place a link above the form that directs Outlook 2007 users from the e-mail to an online version. You can also track this link in order to start quantifying the number of customers on your database that cannot see forms in their e-mail client."

Papanicolaou warns that as security controls get tighter, graphical images should not be used to convey the message, but rather to support the message. "Not only will new software versions introduce new challenges for e-mail marketers, but system administrators are also increasing their control over what is allowed into their employees' inbox. Embedded images are often the first to be blocked, therefore customers receiving e-mails must be able to read the message without having to see the images."



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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Why eBilling?

Why is Electronic Billing (EBPP) all the rage? Is it to cut costs, grow revenue, reduce customer churn or something more? What are the compelling reasons to consider implementing Electronic Billing?

Top 5 Reasons to Implement eBilling

Reason 1: Cost Reduction
The biggest impact that electronic bill presentment has on any organisation is that of significant, instant and measurable cost reduction. Conservative hard cost take-out ranges from 60% to over 90%. These savings are derived from paper suppression and include: printing, insertion, folding, paper, envelopes, and postage.

Additional benefits can also be attributed to soft savings such as manpower, exception handling and general business process improvements. The business case is however so compelling that it is often unnecessary to measure or include these in ROI workings.

Reason 2: Receive Payments Faster
Billing electronically allows companies to receive payments faster and with lower processing costs. For example, in the U.S., first-class mailing rates recently jumped 2 cents but that increase translates into a 2.87 cent hike for business mailers. And mailing costs represent about 70 percent of the cost of invoicing.

In the U.K., postal deliveries have been severely disrupted by a series of strikes by Royal Mail workers.

Why not invoice electronically? It's more economical, you get paid faster and you save those trees.

Reason 3: Reducing Environmental Damage
The green angle of electronic notification and billing has started to resonate with many companies, and consumers themselves who are looking for small but meaningful ways in which they can save the planet.

If all U.S. households received and paid bills electronically, the country would save 16.5 million trees yearly, reduce toxic air pollutants by 3.9 billion tons (equivalent to taking 355,015 cars off the road), and eliminate 1.6 billion pounds of solid waste, says a 2007 survey by Javelin Strategy and Research.

Reason 4: Improved Customer Relationships
Many executives see the flexibility associated with this new technology as a key to becoming more essential to their clients. The more channels of communication that can be supported, the more reliant an organisation's customers are on their relationship with them. It helps maintain client loyalty, and reduces customer churn. While print and mail will always be an important part of the way business is done,many companies are looking to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to communication with clients. Electronic billing achieves this, as well as providing an effective self-service platform, whereby clients can maintain account changes and updates without having to call into a call centre.


Reason 5: Business Growth
While most every potential user understands the implicit revenue benefit in improving customer convenience and satisfaction, many are realising that their electronic billing project assists in achieving incremental revenue goals.

EBPP can leverage the customer data contained in existing CRM systems to personalise bills with customer-specific content and targeted marketing. The more personalised the communication with the customer, the more likely the customer will stay with their biller.

Many providers have invested heavily in CRM in an attempt to learn more about their customers’ interests, desires, and habits. With that new knowledge, providers can leverage their CRM output to deliver efficient and cost-effective EBPP that’s clear, consistent, and personalised to reflect their customers’ preferences.

The bill and recurring account statements are the most frequent touch points between most companies and their customers. Bills and statements arrive month after month.
The bill and recurring account statements are how most companies communicate with their customers. A CRM solution that doesn’t include e-billing and e-statements is missing the mark.


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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Electronic invoices could save €10bn a year

From DutchNews

Dutch companies could save €10bn a year if they stopped sending invoices on paper and just used electronic mail, the entrepreneurs organisations VNO-NCW and MKB told Monday's Financieele Dagblad.

At the moment 95% of Dutch companies still send paper invoices even though it costs €30 per invoice compared with €6 for an electronic bill.

According to the two organisations, however, the existing EDI standard for electronic billing is much too expensive and they support the European Commission's plan to develop a new one.

End

Striata has previously reported the following alluring statistics about electronic billing. The focus is mainly on the US market.

  • eBilling adoption rates vary from 3 – 8% on average according to Chartwell’s 2005 report (Striata note: This is achieved after 2-3 years, using the traditional 'Pull' method of bringing consumers to a website).
  • 90% of email users send and receive email every day, and 44% are on email constantly - DoubleClick’s 6th Annual consumer Study, 2005
  • 76% of consumers would prefer to receive bills via email than having to visit a website - Bank Technology News Research (04/2002)
  • 69% of American households pay at least one bill online according to CheckFree in 2006
  • 73% of Insurance customers are prepared to pay their bills electronically - MarketSearch Corporation, 2006 - Conducted for Computer Sciences Corporation


All the evidence points to the fact that organisations are slowly understanding the benefits to be achieved with electronic billing.

Monday, October 15, 2007

E-mail Faces Deletion

What follows is an excellent article in debate style from Business Week discussing whether email is doomed to die a slow and painful death.

Will Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter unseat simple electronic mail as the No. 1 business communications tool?

Pro: The New and Improved

E-mail carries many problems that new tools don’t. For example, e-mail isn’t a good way to share knowledge. When I left NEC (NIPNF), I had 1.5 gigabytes of e-mail, including a lot of valuable information that my replacement would have loved to have access to. But when I left, my e-mail account was turned off. I don’t have access to that knowledge now. Neither does NEC. Same thing when I left Microsoft (MSFT).

What’s more, spam continues to menace e-mail accounts in a big way. I have the best anti-spam technology, but it regularly puts important messages into my spam folder, and spam still gets through.

Finally, e-mail doesn’t work with groups very well. If I send a report to my boss, co-workers can’t listen in and add value. On blogs, on the other hand, that happens all the time. (The best ideas, I’ve found, come from people who aren’t directly involved in the project.) When I was writing a book, the audience made all sorts of improvements. If we had just e-mailed directly to the publisher, we would have lost all those group-work advantages.

So, let’s look at how I use Twitter and other Web 2.0 systems like Pownce and Jaiku.

With these applications, spam barely exists. If someone starts spamming the system, he or she gets “unfollowed” and the problem is solved. And everything gets a permalink and a URL. So if I want to link to it or pass it around or get it into search engines, problem solved. You can’t link to an e-mail.

Everyone has an identity on these applications—a picture. And you can see that people are online and answering stuff and what they are doing. Twitter has an API (Application Programming Interface), so messages can be used in new ways, like the display on twittervision.com.

Another advantage: With Twitter, I can watch the streams for things that interest me. For instance, I can have all messages that include the word BusinessWeek sent to me automatically. E-mail, because its main use-case is private, could never do that.

Furthermore, anything said on Twitter stays on the Web. So your knowledge doesn’t disappear; it stays there for your replacement at your employer to study and learn from.

Does that mean e-mail is going away entirely? No. E-mail is still useful for one-to-one messages that must remain private. But e-mail will find less and less utility inside corporations.

Con: A Solid Cyber-Friend

I sometimes joke with friends from my Web 1.0 generation that I have a killer idea for a Web 2.0 application. This application will provide businesses with a communications epicenter that employees can use to send and receive any type of digital media, including text, documents, audio, and video—all for little or no cost. Always on, this application will be based on an open standard that allows all employees to connect with the members of their social network regardless of what network they belong to or what Internet-enabled device they use.

My killer Web 2.0 application is, of course, the e-mail in-box—the very place where the overwhelming majority of today’s workers begin and end their business day. Notably, e-mail is also the primary promotional medium for today’s Web 2.0 companies. Social media stalwarts such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace (NWS) rely on e-mail as their principal way to connect and gain new members. YouTube (GOOG) and Revver leverage e-mail as a viral engine to extend the reach of their video networks. Even Twitter requires an e-mail address during registration so it can send members critical account information.

Admittedly, e-mail users do have some legitimate gripes with the medium. They wrestle with e-mail etiquette. Their stress levels rise when their unread e-mail volume increases. Their blood boils when unsolicited commercial e-mails circumvent their spam filters and waste their time.

I share these frustrations, but I also realize that the solution for business is not more applications—it’s better applications. Accordingly, I firmly believe we should view e-mail and Web 2.0 technologies not as competitors but rather as evolutionary partners. Their mutual goal should be to establish a spam-free in-box in which e-mail, SMS, RSS, IM, voice, and video—even “tweets” if you like—can co-exist and increase employee productivity.

Need a buzzword for this future vision? Call it “Inbox 2.0,” if you must—a communication center that consolidates all messages in one location while tapping the collective knowledge of social networks to filter out illegitimate senders, organize conversations across media, and prioritize content for employee response.

As for e-mail’s place in Inbox 2.0, I submit that it will be front and center, as it is today. Businesses are, after all, creatures of profit, and e-mail still provides the greatest value for the lowest cost.

Could e-mail’s primacy ever be threatened? You know what they say—never say never. For the foreseeable future, however, Web 2.0 pundits would be wise not to confuse e-mail’s maturity with obsolescence. To do so might be to miss out on the Web 3.0 opportunity of a lifetime.

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[Ed. This confirms Striata's belief that the Inbox is becoming the desktop of the future, where more and more time is spent during an online session. Microsoft's Outlook 2007 is already moving towards "Inbox 2.0", by providing in-application previews of any and all attachments, without having to start a separate application.

Virgin Media monthly 50p E-Billing Discount

Virgin Media recently announced a 50p per month saving for all customers signing up for Electronic Billing.

You can read about the offer here:
http://www.virginmedia.com/customers/yourchanges.php
(scroll down towards the bottom of the page)

and sign up for the service here:
https://ebill2.virginmedia.com/ebilling/Registration.jsp


This is another example of a large investment on a web portal that can process payments. However, according to Striata, most businesses, and even users, tend to avoid logging in to portals to pay one bill. It's just too complex to have to remember login information for every bill you have to pay, particularly for small and medium sized business.

E-mail continues to be the communication medium of choice, yet most billers only offer Internet website presentment. Enticing the customer to go online and register is expensive and generally yields poor results. In addition customers continually forget their usernames and passwords, resulting in expensive phone calls to customer service centres.

In many programmes it takes between 7 and 24 clicks for a customer to find and pay his bill far too many to make the experience worth repeating. And security fears such as Phishing and identity theft are still hindering online payment. Finally, marketers are having difficulty effectively communicating the benefits to the consumer.

AN INTRODUCTION TO SECURE EBPP

There are several ways for billers to ensure that a large percentage of customers migrate to e-Billing. There should be no upfront customer registration, and no need for a customer to visit a website. Customers should not require more than a dial-up connection, and should not have to remember a username and password. The e-Bill should look the same as the paper bill that customers are used to, and they should be able to view and pay it online in under 30 seconds, or save it and pay it later.

This can all be achieved through secure e-mail billing. The e-mail billing process starts when the biller gets a customer's e-mail address commonly at account activation, or when the customer contacts the call centre. Every contact is an opportunity to get this information. A shared secret is chosen that is known only to the biller and the customer. This can be a Social Security number, Zip Code (or postal code), account number or anything else that the customer nominates (and is easy to remember).

The biller then sends the customer his next bill via secure e-mail, and the customer uses the shared secret to decrypt and open his e-Bill. The e-Bill looks exactly the same as the paper bill, and the customer can print it out if required.

The customer enters his banking details and the amount he wishes to pay in the Payment Section at the top or the bottom of the e-Bill (the amount is defaulted to the total amount due), and clicks on PAY. The transaction has been completed with just two clicks.

The payment is then automatically submitted, without the need for the customer to visit a website, and he is sent a popup and an e-mail confirming the payment. The payment flows directly into the billers bank account, exactly like any other ACH payment.

Once one or two e-bills have been successfully received and paid by the customer, the biller automatically stops sending paper bills.

Striata has found that customer feedback has been extremely positive; many said that the email bill saved them time, because they no longer needed to visit a payment centre to settle their accounts. And because they were able to choose the shared secret password themselves, they felt the system was secure.

The answer appears to be to return to basics. Stop trying to change customer behaviour and start inserting your bill into your customers daily routine. As long as you are expecting your customers to do something to turn off paper, its simply not going to happen to any significant degree. Make participation easy and adoption rates will increase to the benefit of both utilities and their customers.



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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Climate Change Concerns More Corporations - eBilling Can Help Your CSR

Climate change is increasingly topping the agenda in companies across the world. More and more businesses are searching for ways to protect the environment, and their profits.

The topic of climate change has also entered boardrooms. Top brass have warmed to the notion of cutting back on work-related flights, as well as driving cars which emit fewer emissions, and implementing green energy and electronic billing.

Susanna Monni is the Executive Director at Finnish Business and Society, a network which encourages corporations to embrace social responsibility. She said that Al Gore's Nobel and Oscar award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, delivered a powerful global message on climate change. The Stern Report, which put a price tag on the effects of climate change, also shook up the business world.

Image is also part of the bargain. Consumers in industrialised countries are increasingly selecting products with certifications of sustainability, or from companies with 'green' images.

Source: YLE News

Striata have calculated that for every 500,000 bills printed, the following environmental damage is done:
  • 13 tons of paper is used
  • 26 tons of trees are destroyed
  • 214,000 gallons of water is used
  • 25,233 pounds of solid waste is generated
  • 780 pounds of air emissions are spewed out
  • 65,754 pounds of greenhouse gases are emitted
(Using tools provided at papercalculator.org)

Implementing eBilling provides a powerful Corporate Social Responsibility message to your customers and shareholders.

How Does eBilling Work?

eBilling, or electronic billing, enables billers to create and distribute digital bills to their customers instead of printing and mailing out paper bills. The obvious advantage of e-bill from a biller perspective is related to cost, especially as postal delivery fees continue to rise.

For large, major billers, there are two predominant distribution methods for e-bill, biller-direct, and/or through a consumer service provider (CSP). Many billers choose to distribute e-bills via both channels, as opposed to just choosing one.


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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Online Bill Payments Surpass Checks for the First Time Among Internet- Connected Households

ATLANTA - A new study reported today finds that for the first time, consumers in Internet-connected households are paying more of their household bills online than by check. The survey was conducted in January 2007 by Harris Interactive and The Marketing Workshop. (Source: CheckFree Corp.).

For the first time, consumers in Internet-connected households are paying more of their bills online than by paper check, according to a new study conducted by Harris Interactive and the Marketing Workshop.

The 2007 Consumer Bill Payment Survey showed that, for the first time, online bill payments exceeded bill payments made by paper check among online households.

Online payments made up 39% of the total volume of bill payments among online households, an increase of 4 percentage points over a December 2005 survey. In contrast, the volume of checks sent through the mail fell 4 percentage points to 34% of the overall volume.

Striata has found another study by Aite Group predicts that online payments will rise to 28% by 2010. At the same time, check usage for consumer bill payment is falling rapidly, from 50% in 2005 to 27% in 2008 (also predicted by the Aite Group).

The rush to accept electronic payments has been a major driver of Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) programs for many. The focus appears to be shifting. Electronic bill presentment is now being pushed more urgently, in the hopes of reducing printing and mailing costs, and saving a few trees.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

eBilling Video Spoof

More great reasons to opt for electronic billing.
Found on YouTube - a spoof of the massive iPhone bill video.
Caution - contains strong language.

Explanation of eBilling Video

Pittsburgh blogger Justine Ezarik gets her first iPhone bill -- all 300 pages of it, detailing thousands of text messages. Watch her uncut interview with WTAE-TV's Andrew Stockey about her blog post.

What is eBilling? Video Explains All

Electronic Billing is the electronic delivery and presentation of financial statements, bills, invoices, and related information sent by a company to its customers. Electronic billing is also referred to as the following:

  • e-billing or eBilling
  • EBPP — Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment
  • EIPP — Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment

Why is eBilling a Good Idea?



View this eBilling video:






---------------------------------------------------------------

About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Electronic Billing Saves Trees - People urged to go the paperless route

BY CATHY JETT

Switch to online banking and bill paying and help to save the planet.

That's the message a number of banks and businesses soon will be using to persuade consumers to go paperless.

"Many consumers do not realize the full impact their household could make by simply asking to turn off paper bills and statements once they've adopted online banking," Stuart Williams, co-chair of the Electronic Payments Association's new "green coalition," said in a prepared statement.

A new study by Calif.-based Javelin Strategy and Research, for example, found that if all the nation's households just received and paid bills electronically, they'd save 16.5 million trees each year, or the amount of lumber needed to build 216,054 typical single-family homes.

The Electronic Payments Association's "green coalition" also plans to play up the environmentally friendly aspect of going paperless in a campaign it has begun planning. It will likely consist of information large companies can use to encourage their customers to go paperless.

"Consumers want to take individual action that can collectively lead to real impact on the environment," said Craig Vaream, the other green coalition co-chair. "Through this initiative, we want consumers to recognize that choosing electronic bills, statements and payments provides the additional benefit of eliminating the unnecessary waste of natural resources."

The ability to go online to do everything from checking bank statements to getting bills and paying them has been around since the mid-1990s when such institutions as Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo rolled out the option. But it's started to catch on only in the last few years.

Today, more than half of all households in the United States make at least one recurring payment online and four out of five consumers who use it say they are very satisfied with it, according to the Electronic Payments Association.

And direct payment, which is an automated debit from a customer's account, increased by 6.1 percent to 4.7 billion payments in 2006, it found.

At Verizon, about 1.7 million customers now get their statements online, said Angeline DePauw, the utility's director of electronic remissions. But that accounts for only about 5 percent of all the billing Verizon does.

The company is focusing on getting the 8 million customers who currently pay their Verizon bill online but continue to get paper statements to make the switch to online statements.

"They're the ones who are more apt to do it," DePauw said.
Currently, when Verizon customers sign up for online banking, their financial institution automatically enrolls them in the Electronic Billing Information Delivery System (EBID) for 90 days.

EBID will post a note on their personal online bank page saying how much their next Verizon bill is and the due date, plus provide a link to the utility company.

"Most people, if it looks reasonable, will pay," DePauw said.

Online banking also has become popular at Wachovia spokeswoman, said Christine Shaw.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank's online banking features allow customers to see all of their Wachovia accounts--including bank accounts, mortgages and investments--on one site. They also can see scanned images of their checks, and set up recurring bills so they're paid automatically.

"It's convenient," said Shaw. "You don't have to pay for a stamp, and it's real easy to transfer funds from one account to another. You can look at all your transactions online and review them online."

Wachovia also encourages customers to check their accounts frequently to head off identity fraud, she said.

Going paperless cuts down on the risk of identity fraud, which is more like to happen offline where family, friends and employees have access to financial statements, than online, according to studies done by both Javelin Strategy and Research and the Better Business Bureau in 2003.

Bruce Cundiff, Javelin's online payments expert, said his company also has found that online customers are more likely to catch identity fraud early because they can monitor their accounts anytime, not just when monthly statements arrive in their mailbox.

Soon, online customers will even be able to get messages about their accounts on their cell phones, and contact their bank, credit-card company or other financial institution immediately if something seems amiss, he said.

Mobile devices allow the conversation to be two-way, something Javelin calls "interactive financial messaging," Cundiff said.

"Say I got a mobile message saying, 'Are you trying to send $5,000 to Eastern Europe?' I can e-mail back, 'No, don't let it go.' It's actually preventing fraudulent activity by stopping it in its tracks."

Cathy Jett: 540/374-5407



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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Landmark Survey Reveals Significant Environmental Impact by Organizations and Customers Who Embrace Electronic Billing and Settlement

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, August 21, 2007 - AVOLENT, a leading provider of self-service eBilling and eSettlement software, today released recent survey results illustrating the environmental impact business organizations have by offering electronic billing and payment software in partnership with their customers who embrace a paperless business relationship. Current AVOLENT customers included in this study include DELL, HP, Xerox, OfficeDepot, Highmark, Do It Best, and more.

Implementing AVOLENT software proves to have a domino effect of benefits to the environment. The need for paper products is eliminated in the billing and payment processes for customers who have adopted online invoicing and payment. Using calculations supplied by the Environmental Defense Fund ( www.papercalculator.org ) over 1,000,000 trees every year are saved due to this adoption. The preservation of these trees ensures that over 300 million pounds of green house gases are not released into our atmosphere, over 1 billion gallons of wastewater is saved, and over 100 million pounds of solid waste generated by paper manufacturing and landfill additions is eliminated.

AVOLENT customers say:

"The advantages of paperless billing and payment are overwhelming. Not only does electronic invoice delivery and online payment help preserve many aspects of the environment, but our customers are demanding more and more of our business relationship be completed over the web."

"Over 80% of our customers have adopted paperless billing and payment with us which translates into real and sustaining customer loyalty and an enormous reduction in operational cost and environmental waste."

"In environmental terms, AVOLENT paperless billing and payment effectively saves enough trees each year to populate the entire state of Rhode Island, and saves enough of our precious natural resources to power a small city," said Mike Seashols, Chairman and CEO of AVOLENT. "AVOLENT is proud that this is a 'convenient truth' to be shared with everyone. Each individual and each organization can have a direct impact on our environment by electing to be part of paperless electronic billing and payment manifesto."

About AVOLENT
AVOLENT is a leading provider of best-of-breed application software for self-service eBilling and eSettlement. The AVOLENT solution suite transforms an organization's paper invoices and manually intensive billing and settlement process into a web-based self-service electronic process that drives higher customer loyalty, enhances customer satisfaction, and improves operational efficiencies, while also preserving our natural resources. Organizations like DELL, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Highmark, PacifiCare, Office Depot, Penske Leasing, and many others use AVOLENT as their electronic billing and settlement engine to process over one billion dollars of invoices per week and preserve over a million trees every year with paperless invoicing and settlement. AVOLENT is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For additional information about AVOLENT, visit www.avolent.com

Press Contact:
AVOLENT
Anthony Mejia
Vice President, Marketing
415.553.6400



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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

'Push' vs. 'Pull' eBilling

Most of your customers now say they prefer electronic bills to paper ones. This is great news--provided you make the most of the opportunity to strengthen the customer relationship.

More and more customers are going to their keyboards instead of their mailboxes to collect and pay bills for their homes and businesses. In fact, a majority of customers who have at-home Internet access now say they actually prefer electronic billing to the old paper-based way of doing business, according to the April 2007 Consumer Bill Payment Survey, conducted on behalf of e-billing vendor CheckFree by Harris Interactive and the Marketing Workshop.

For the first time since CheckFree began sponsoring the survey in 2002, the volume of online e-billing activity exceeds the volume of paper bills paid by households that have Internet access. More impressively, customers using consolidated billing services are 39 percent less likely to switch to a competitor. "It increases the lifetime value of customers by raising satisfaction and preventing churn," says Lori Stepp, CheckFree's managing executive of e-bill adoption services.

Curiously, the very concern that once kept consumers from adopting Web-based invoicing and bill payments--security--is now driving them to it. Customers realize that paper bills potentially expose their account information to many more prying eyes. "The sea of change has come with the understanding that establishing [an] online relationship is a very solid protective measure against identity fraud," says Bruce Cundiff, senior analyst with Javelin Strategy and Research in Pleasanton, Calif. "Most identity theft and fraud cases can be traced to the handling--or mishandling--of paper documents, such as a check or bill taken from an unsecured mailbox. Until recently, consumers felt that banks were initiating e-billing simply as a cost savings."

Consumers are also attracted to the fact that e-bills are greener. (See "A Green Light for Marketing," in CRM Magazine, June 2007.) Javelin estimates that if all bills were viewed and paid online, the nation's landfills would be spared 800,000 tons of solid waste per year--about 18.5 million trees--and some 2.1 million tons of greenhouse gases would not be released into the air.

What is E-Billing?


Despite growing acceptance, customer confusion about how e-billing works remains an ongoing hurdle. As CheckFree's Stepp puts it, "Consumers are still trying to figure out what e-bills are."

E-billing is nothing more than the replacement of a traditional paper bill by some form of electronic bill delivered and processed via an online site or email. It is often called electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP).

Some companies present bills to the customer via a Web site--either their own, or that of a consolidator who aggregates bills from various billers. Others offer customers the option of paying directly via email. For these billers, the question becomes: Do you "push" the bill to your customer in an email or "pull" her to a Web site? According to Cundiff, the answer varies depending on "the nature of the customer base and how savvy the customers are in using the online channel."

The pull model requires the customer to log onto the Web site to view an invoice before authorizing payment. The push model presents the invoice in a secure email and allows the customer to authorize payment using a button embedded in the message. Because it does not require log-in, push minimizes the cost and overhead of helping customers when they forget their usernames and passwords.

Either way, the bills are paid by credit card or, to reduce the potential for fraud, by draft through an automated clearing house (ACH) that handles the transaction processing. Both methods also include all the things that customers would expect to find in a paper bill: the invoice, company and regulatory data, and information on other company services and offerings. So e-bills still provide the upselling opportunities that used to share envelope space with mailed bills.

For instance, Metavante, one of the nation's largest e-billing providers, offers its financial-services clients the ability to include loyalty reward offers such as travel certificates, gift cards, and merchandise. Still, as Cundiff says, to promote customer adoption "the message has to be that paying bills online is not only a cost-savings measure for us and more convenient for you, it's safer."

The ROI of e-bills


Make no mistake: Even as consumers embrace the security, convenience, and earth-friendly assurances that e-billing affords them, billers do enjoy significant cost savings over paper-based billing, particularly when the value of customer relationships is factored in.

Plant Telecommunications, one of the country's few remaining family-owned, independent telecommunications companies, began using e-billing in January to reduce costs and promote efficiency. The company's customers include businesses and residents in seven rural exchanges in southern Georgia; many of those customers also subscribe to its dial-up Internet service.

"Our exchanges are very spread out," says David A. Nelson, customer service manager for Plant Tel. "They're not contiguous." Nevertheless, many customers are still in the habit of driving as far as 50 miles to the company's office to pay their bills at the last minute. "It was difficult for them to get to us--and difficult for us," Nelson notes. "We had a lot of cut-offs because of overdue bills."

Cut-offs not only make for unhappy customers, they cost Plant Tel money to process cut-off notifications and to restart the service when the customer does pay. "We wanted a system that allowed our customers more convenience in paying us," Nelson says. Furthermore, many did not like the prospect of giving credit-card information over the phone.

Plant Tel evaluated e-billing options for two years before choosing an email-centric solution from Striata, a New York--based application software developer and service provider. Because Striata's solution presents the bill in a secure email document, allowing customers to authorize payments directly from that document, it does not require customers to use the Web as other solutions do. That was critical to Plant Tel's ability to win customer adoption because few in its rural customer base have broadband access. The company did not want people opting out of e-billing because they had to wait for a rich Web page to open.

"We see a much shorter turnaround time in recording a payment," Nelson reports. "With this method, it's virtually instantaneous. It's in the bank the next day. It allows us to consolidate what would be many different paper bills onto one statement and allows our customers to pay it electronically."

Since Plant Tel implemented e-billing in January, about 15 percent of its customers have opted to replace paper with e-bills. "We've really had a lot of positive feedback from customers--both residential and businesses," Nelson says. He estimates it has saved the company at least $2 per bill.

The cost of getting paid


BillTrust, a provider of comprehensive outsourced corporate billing services, estimates that a company's out-of-pocket "cost of getting paid" runs as high as $2.25 for every paper bill sent. That includes about 60 cents in paper, printing costs, envelopes, and postage; an estimated 15 cents in wages and benefits paid to the employees who work to mail them out; and 50 cents to $1.50 per bill for return handling, posting payment checks, and taking the money to the bank.

That does not include equipment costs for such things as printers, postage meters, and folding machines to perform the mailings, nor does it include the impact of Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), the number of days between the purchase and the day the biller gets paid. The longer the DSO, the more the biller is forced to pay for its own operating costs out of current cash flow.

There are also costs for customer service, fraud detection, and dispute resolution when a customer questions the bill. Gartner estimates that the cost of resolving a disputed charge can run as high as $20.

Finally there are the hard-to-assess losses when recurring billing problems drive customers to the competition. With e-bills there is also reduced opportunity for human error and fewer disputes over whether a payment was really late or the amount paid was inaccurate because customers receive confirmation of their payments online at the time they pay the e-bill. Customer service becomes largely a function of self-service. "Every merchant has a different lifetime value to the customer and a different number they can assign to retention," says Stepp, the CheckFree executive.

Cracking the B2B nut


One of the key challenges on the biller's side is to acquire, store, and maintain customers' electronic addresses. This can be daunting for companies that want to integrate new and existing customer data with legacy systems that lack necessary fields for adding and updating the information. According to Cundiff, it's one of the reasons why e-billing has more readily been adopted in the B2C space than in the B2B market.

"There are ingrained processes in B2B that are a lot more difficult to evolve," Cundiff says. "The question is, 'How do I migrate from paper-based invoicing if I've been doing it for 40 years?'" For example, companies that want to keep consolidated records in account histories are often reluctant to dispense with paper files. Any transition to e-billing requires customer service and accounting personnel to check both paper and electronic records when a question related to account histories comes up.

Striata recommends best practices for capturing and updating customer email addresses. They include identifying all customer touch points and using a short script for all customer interactions. Customers are not only asked for their email addresses, but also for permission to communicate via email, and whether they would like to receive a sample e-bill. The sample bill, sent to the customer to verify the address, includes a push button that enrolls the customer for e-billing. Customers can also be asked for additional information like mobile phone numbers and permission to communicate via text messages. "Text messaging can be used to great value in integrated electronic communication programs," notes Barrie Arnold, Striata's vice president of sales.

Here, again, the challenge resides in how to integrate information from these channels with existing CRM and enterprise accounting systems. Rather than building in-house solutions, many billers opt for business process outsourcing (BPO) with companies like EDS or Convergys that specialize in services, including e-billing, for the B2B market.

Even in those cases, e-billing remains customer-centric. Convergys, for example, claims to have designed its service around "human-factors research" to promote customer action and promote ease-of-use. In helping clients to design e-billing systems, says Kevin Smith, director of product development at Cincinnati-based Convergys, "the tug of war is between simplicity and trying to empower a lot of functionality for the user. You're trying to get people to do more on the site but you also want to keep it simple."

E-billing alone isn't the end of the self-care question. Companies have to decide precisely how much Web-based customer self-care they wish to provide. With self-care you need a knowledge base--and the more self-care that's provided, the bigger the required knowledge base.

Retail sites often add channels to open live conversations with an agent. Telecom companies often add buttons and features that enable customers to quickly resolve disputed charges. And, although it typically requires a complex process, e-billing systems (whether installed internally or provided on an outsourced basis) can also be integrated with a company's enterprise CRM or accounting system to build account histories and provide all employees with the same views of the billing account that the customer sees.

"Certainly, billing behavior and transaction history is of high value from a CRM standpoint," Cundiff says. "It's very important to provide historical information to individual customers." Bills can also be integrated with other business processes to become selling tools.

But, according to CheckFree's Stepp, the most important aspect of e-billing is that it provides a way of enhancing the customer relationship. "It's more secure, it's more convenient, and it's faster," she says, adding that when companies implement e-billing, "they're creating a customer-satisfier."

And that's something every company wants to take to the bank.


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About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

eBilling Adoption Examined

It is approximately 12 years since the Internet and email began its significant impact on our lives. In that time, there is almost no aspect of our daily activities that is not influenced by this. In the USA today, over 80% of all Americans between the age of 10 and 70, access the internet multiples time a week, the vast majority doing so every day, and as high as 35%, many times a day.

A subgroup of internet and email is electronic billing – the ability for a consumer or business with access to the internet, to be able to view and pay their bill or invoice through their personal computer. This is an emerging trend that is still however in its infancy. The majority of consumers, over 95%, still receive almost all of their bills in paper form. Although it is becoming more common to pay some bills either through a bank’s billpay service or at the biller’s own website, the primary driver of electronic billing, that being paper suppression, is not being realized.

There is a massive and growing awareness of the environmental impact of paper production. For every 38,500 bills produced, 1 ton of paper is used, 2 tons of trees are destroyed, 16,450 gallons of water is used, 1,941 pounds of solid waste is generated, 60 pounds of air emissions are spewed out and 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are emitted. (www.papercalculator.org) Billers in the USA for example, produce (at a minimum) 14 to 16 pieces of paper and as many envelopes, per customer per annum. That is 7,5 million pieces of paper per year for a mid market biller with 500 000 customers, or in green terms, 400 tons of trees…

Let’s take a moment to examine why that is:

  • Right now, the consumer does not need to do anything; the paper bill arrives without them having to perform any action. It is the way it has happened all of their lives and there is currently no compelling reason to do it any other way.
  • The electronic billing offerings that are prevalent in this industry (in the USA) all involve the following:
  1. The utility needs to, and in most cases has, built a self-service website. I.E.: a location on the internet where a consumer can go and view and pay their bill.
  2. However, the consumer does not know it is there unless expensive marketing is undertaken.
  3. Sadly, there is neither incentive nor compelling reason to visit these websites. In all cases, it is quicker and more convenient to write a check and drop it in the USPS mail, even at a 41c cost.
  4. The best websites require a consumer to register, choose and remember (yet another) username & password.
  5. They require between 6 to as many as 14 clicks to view & pay the bill.
  6. At very best, it takes three to eight times as long to do so than writing a check.
  7. They require consumers to learn different navigation for each biller’s website.
  8. A copy of the bill is available online, but in every case it is not the first thing that the consumer sees. So the familiarity is lost and the consumer feels that something has been taken away from them.
  9. The result? Even if some do pay online, 95% still get a paper bill too.
  10. To make matters worse, now that the ‘innovators’ and a portion of the ‘early adopters’ are paying online, it is becoming progressively more difficult (and increasingly more expensive) for billers to attract their consumers to their self service portals.
  11. From the biller’s perspective, most are now on second or even third generation websites after three to six years. Hundreds, if not thousands of dollars have been spent on building, servicing & supporting these initiatives and the Return on Investment is nowhere even remotely in sight.

Our take on this? The model is fatally flawed and will not result in significant paper suppression.

The Future of Electronic Billing – Your Inbox



Within the realm of internet driven technology, the single most pervasive application is that of email.

Let's take a few steps back and think about the time before email. There were four kinds of paper mail; Junk mail, Business / work related mail, Personal mail , and of course, your bills.

These days, in the email era, three of the four mail types have made their way directly into your inbox. The one type that is conspicuously missing are your bills. Now why is that? There is no clear answer that we can come to. We can only guess that it was easier for the biller to try and 'pull' you to his website than to electronically deliver you your bill.

However, recent research tells us that the average internet user is spending 96% of his online time handling his email. (Just think about the amount of time you personally spend handling email communication as opposed to visiting websites.)

Billers now have access to efficient systems & technology that securely deliver your bill, and take payment, directly from within your inbox. The difference from a customer's perspective is dramatic: two clicks to view and pay your bill.

E-mail has become the ubiquitous business and personal communication medium. Our take on the future of electronic billing: There is no logical nor practical reason why your bills are not in your inbox, and it is only a matter of time before they are. Billers are going to combine both 'push' and 'pull' Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment strategies to ensure maximum customer adoption.

Imagine getting all your bills directly into your inbox. Imagine that paying each bill took less than 30 seconds. Now that's delivering true electronic billing convenience.



---------------------------------------------------------------

About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Carbon Footprint and eBilling

Big business organisations are coming under increasing pressure to reduce carbon gas emissions to contain the greenhouse effect and slow down global warming. An efficient, cost effective and easily implemented way for businesses to play a practical, effective role in carbon reduction is to stop paper billing and adopt the electronic equivalent, eBilling.

The global green movement, driven by mainly young people in Europe, the UK and Australasia, offers some frightening statistics. Three hundred years ago (a miniscule period of time in the Earth's history) the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was just 200 ppm (parts per million).

Today that level has nearly doubled to 380 ppm and over the last 100 years global temperatures have risen by 1ºC. Scientists predict that unless the world co-operates and implements the Kyoto Protocol, carbon levels could reach 500 ppm by 2050 with an average global temperature rise of 3ºC, which will be a turning point for imbalances and snowballing seriously adverse impacts on our society.

Banks, financial institutions, insurance companies, utility service providers, telcos and other organisations with large monthly-billed customer bases can make a significant contribution to carbon emission reductions by implementing electronic billing and turning off their paper stream of invoices and statements wherever possible. Recently, the top-40 listed companies on the JSE participated in a carbon disclosure project (CDP) to establish exactly what impact business practices have on the environment.

There have been reports in local newspapers that international buyers have serious concerns about environmental impact and South African companies will find it more and more difficult to sell their products in world markets. The reports also say that South Africa's carbon dioxide production has more than doubled from 1980 and that local exporters are already being affected by large retailers in the UK and the EU which have implemented carbon labelling. Some EU retailers have begun calling for punitive trade measures to root out environmentally unsustainable production processes and force businesses into action to mitigate their impacts.

There have also been reports that carbon reporting will also increasingly influence investment decisions and some analysts believe that large pension funds could move their funds out of carbon-inefficient investments into stocks that support a sustainable environment.

How can eBilling help?

By converting a large proportion of paper-based communications to secure electronic communications, companies can achieve significant carbon credits.

Lloyds Bank in the UK has identified paper use as one of its four key performance Indicators. The company has a retail customer base of around 17-million people and made some calculations based on the mailing each month of 15-million sheets of paper (bank statements) in15-million paper envelopes.

The bank estimated its paper eBill production cost (including postage, but excluding costs such as rent, staff and power) amounted to 18p (R2.52) per eBill. A maximum of 30% of the customer base could be converted to eBilling (an extremely conservative assumption).

Lloyds established that the annual impact on the environment (limited to the eBill production process, and excluding the delivery of bills) was 4,675 tons of paper used, 9,351 tons of trees destroyed, 306-million litres of water used, 4-million kgs of solid waste produced and almost 11-million kgs of gases emitted.

Based on these estimations, implementation of a secure electronic document delivery solution could result in bottom line savings of £16-million (about R224-million) over five years against set up fees of less than £150 000. Including licence fees, this would result in a return on investment in less than five months.

Apart from the obvious short-term benefits, there could be more significant long-term benefits for companies reducing their carbon outputs. In Europe, companies are already being given carbon credit rewards for doing so.

In the US, the Electronic Payments Association and Javelin Strategy & Research have been promoting online eBill payment and online eBill acceptance as ways for consumers to reduce carbon emissions, waste in landfills and to save trees. Their research revealed that if every American household viewed and paid its bills online, it would reduce solid waste in U.S. landfills by more than 800 000 tons a year and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2.1 million tons.

American banks are actively promoting green consciousness amongst their customer bases by urging them to make payments online. A recent national survey established that 94% of Americans say they are willing to make changes in their lives to help the environment. The survey concluded that going green was no longer just the right thing to do, but is also seen as being very positive for a company's bottom line.

SA appears to be lagging in the global race to go green. In global terms, SA is not a large producer of carbon emissions but, measuring carbon emissions against gross domestic product, it has a dismal footprint. Pressure is mounting to improve that status and Johannesburg is one of 30 cities worldwide whose mayors are campaigning to encourage national governments to support city leaders in combating climate change.

eBilling is proving a fast, convenient and environmentally friendly payment option worldwide which achieves results. For every 38 500 bills produced, a ton of paper is used, two tons of trees are destroyed, 65 000 litres of water is used and 2 500kg of greenhouse gases are emitted. By implementing eBilling, not only are costs reduced but the impact on the environment is dramatically curtailed.

If you would like to calculate your personal carbon footprint, this is an interesting calculator.



---------------------------------------------------------------

About Striata

Striata is the global leader in Secure eDocument Delivery.

Striata's Secure eDocument Delivery and Email Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) are solution sets - software applications and adoption methodologies - that deliver rapid reduction in operational costs, quicker payments and enhanced customer service by revolutionising the way bills, statements, contracts, policies, annual reports, payslips and other high volume system-generated documents are delivered and paid.

Unlike today's online presentment solutions, which insist on customers visiting and registering at a website, Striata’s complimentary solution (targeting customers still receiving paper) delivers feature-rich, registration-free, navigable and interactive secure email documents directly to their inbox and enables ‘one-click’ electronic payment without them having to visit a single web-page.

This innovative and strategic change from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ dramatically increases customer adoption of electronic communication, allowing Striata’s clients to achieve rapid ROI from their self-service and e-communication investments.

Visit Striata's Global Site.