Last month an curious report was published on a blog which made a very beneficial reference to on line music, and iTunes in particular, in relation to ebilling. In his report the author recommend that if we thought about bills in music terms:
- Cds (and the artists that produce them) are like paper bills;
- Listening to music online is like logging in to a portal to view and pay your bill; and
- Downloading a song (file) to your chosen gadget from iTunes is like receiving your bill as a file (attachment) to your Pc, tablet, iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc.
This report rather strangely goes on to stop that all music should be delivered by email attachment so that customers can open it on all their different listening devices.
Despite that fact that this report seems to get a tiny lost quite quickly, it does draw a beneficial normal analogy and it is therefore worth seeing at the core query that it hints at but never answers-will an iTunes type of web site for ebilling ever come into being (and how of course)?
First and prominent let's get the comparisons right here:
- Songs(or "albums" of songs) should be compared to bills in general
- Artistsshould be compared to merchants (and some of both are very large and some are tiny)
- Record companiesshould be compared to banks
- Music listenersshould be compared to customers or bill payers
- Cd's(or Vinyl) should be compared to paper-delivered bills
- Online Audio type files(Mp3's, Wavs etc) should be compared to online emails with attachments
- An online store (like iTunes) should be compared to anonline bill-payment portal
You'll notice that we do not yet talk about a delivery gadget like a smart phone or tablet in the above table-we'll cover this later.
The Music Scene
If we look back at modern history, up until as tiny as 10 years ago, the music commerce had been operating in similar fashion for decades. Artists produced songs and approached report fellowships to back them. If they were successful, the report firm would help getting the song(s) to market on vinyl as a particular or a long play record, getting the songs played on radio and elsewhere so that citizen would buy what they liked in main street report stores. Innovation in the music commerce was very slow to come. Vinyl eventually became Cd's and radio went slowly from analogue to digital. However, the biggest changes were in listening devices, which became increasingly portable. This was led by Sony's "Walkman" in 1979-the first step towards Mp3 players which led to the huge commerce paradigm shift-the iPod-introduced in late 2001 (and the new iTunes music store two years later in 2003).
When Apple arrived on the music scene the conveyable Mp3 scene was ripe for convert to something simpler and more curious to customers. In this sense, the iPod, iTouch and finally the iphone and iPad all became the simplest and most user-friendly way to listen to music (both on a live streaming basis and recorded). As a result, the music commerce has been almost completely transformed commercially and listeners (or at least those with a 3G/4G relationship and/or passage to the Internet) have more selection and convenience than they ever had before.
The Billing Scene
So how does this collate to the billing sector? Like music, billing has operating in similar ways for decades. Bills (the song comparison) have been and still are delivered mostly in very customary ways, especially by small and medium sized merchants (the artist comparison). This is by paper in the mail as the simplest format (a bit like the vinyl single) or by mail with a plain Pdf attachment (the Cd comparison). In some cases, the email with attachment may be a tiny more dynamic and sophisticated and can regain signatures for example (used in the B2B billing world). This is more comparable to the Mp3 or wav files in the music world.
Although a dominant player like Apple and a site like iTunes has yet to "explode" in the billing world, we are getting very close to it happening now. For some years, online bill payment has been ready at a merchant's web site, although this does make for some inconvenience for customers when they need to pay a lot of bills (or listen to a lot of songs from different artists at different report companies). Online bill payment has also been ready at bank sites for many years now and has come to be quite well-used by the same citizen who took speedily to Internet banking. Unfortunately, full digital presentment is not commonly ready via this channel, so both of these primary innovations are comparable to the "Walkman"-they have taken us some of the way but there is room for improvement.
The private "cloud-based" bill presentment and payment portal is a much newer innovation in the last 2-3 years, and is much closer to being the billing "paradigm shift" we talked about earlier. In this system, customers can see bills from a given merchant (an artist in music terms) and subscribe to get all the bills they send (or songs they release). Because this is non-merchant owned or bank owned (the equivalent of sometimes cutting out the report companies), customers can see many merchants (or artists), and thus have the capacity to finally start to see all of their bills in one place. Naturally, paying bills is never a fun action like listening to music but the quicker and more de facto you can deal with them the great (and you can get back to what you like doing much more speedily). Having all your bills in one online place (with free back and storehouse and easy retrieval whenever you need access) is the equivalent of getting all of their songs in one playbook-just as iTunes allows now. Customers can then keep these bills (or songs) constantly stored in one place and revisit them whenever they like. These bills are all fully digital and do not have many file formats that have to be tackled (much as Apple made Mp3, Wav and other music file formats an irrelevance to the listener).
Perhaps most importantly, customers can passage their bills at the portal from any gadget that is related to the Internet by some means-a computer, a smart phone, a tablet etc. And because this is all digital, customers can use all of the currently ready and evolving technology that is ready such as bookmarking, flexible sorting (like assembling playlists) and using Sms alerts for example (to prompt the customer when there is a bill to pay or a reputation card to update, just as you would when a new song or album by an artist has been released). Of course this is not to exclude other ways of getting a bill in any other format that may be wanted-you can still send an email or a Pdf or even print them if you like.
Summary
We are not suggesting that bills are everywhere near as much fun to 'access' as music and you will of course listen to the same song a lot more than you will use the same bill. However, we think the broad analogy here is a beneficial one. Our normal end is that the online bill presentment and payment portal is already here and like iTunes will transform the bill payment sector over the next few years just as Apple did. There are a few innovative fellowships that are competing to be the "big gorilla" at the occasion but it is certain that one of these will emerge soon as the dominant player in this space. A few early adopters (the merchants or artists as they would be in the music scene) already understand this and are speedily getting on board. For these merchants this is a relatively painless transition, with no capital outlay and they can be in the online bill presentment and payment space almost immediately to reap the benefits.
Will an "iTunes" Type of Web Site for Ebilling Ever Come Into Being?