Is December 2012 Doomsday for B2C Marketing?

December 21, 2012 is the end-date of a 5,125-year-long cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar and some believe that cataclysmic or transformative events will occur on this date. Forrester believes that by 2012, consolidators' share of the online bill payment market will surpass direct billing by merchants for the first time. In other words, your brand, your marketing opportunities, your customers’ eyeballs will be owned by someone else. Sounds like a doomsday scenario to me. Let's explore further.

A Bill Consolidator, in the EBPP world, is an online Service Provider that consolidates bills from other Billers and presents them in a single portal to the customer. In plain English, bill consolidators receive billing data from numerous billers, aggregate and sort it by consumers enrolled in EBPP programs, then send it to distribution points based upon where individual consumers are enrolled. These distribution sites are commonly banks, but can also be Internet portal sites such as AOL, Quicken.com, and Yahoo! Finance. Examples of consolidators are Yodlee in the US and OneVu in the UK.

While the offering at first glance appears attractive to consumers who want to be able to pay multiple bills from a single location, there are a number of limitations for the biller:

• Only summary level data is visible in the billing portal;


• There are generally no interactive capabilities with the bills and all additional bill content (statement stuffers, regulatory notices, etc. ) are lost;


• The biller loses control over all aspects of the billing/payment process;


• Personalized marketing and branding opportunities are forever doomed.

There is an alternative to the doomsday situation - where the only regular touch point you have with your customer is relegated to someone else - It's called Consumer Consolidation, and the vast majority of your customers already do this in their email inbox.

Consider the average internet user: typically the first application to be opened every day and the last to be closed at night is the email client. Incoming emails are usually dealt with soon after they are received, as opposed to paper correspondence, which often lies on the kitchen table until the end of the week, or longer. Emails are filtered and sorted either according to sender or types of email, making them easy to retrieve. Imagine if the email inbox could be used as the central repository for bills and payment. For the consumer, this is the height of convenience:

• Bills are received electronically, in one place, with personalized filing and sorting;


• Bills can be paid without having to log into countless portals with their necessarily long and complicated access credentials.
  

For the biller, the benefits of being able to communicate directly to their customers instead of relying on the consumer to log into either their own portal, or worse someone else's, represents a paradigm shift in electronic billing. Most importantly, it avoids the B2C Marketing Day of Judgment predicted by Forrester.

Michael Haupt
Managing Director, Striata Europe
www.striata.com