The most common feedback I hear when talking about PostmarkedEmail with both employees and executives at eCommerce divisions of financial institutions is "We currently have a portal solution for eBilling and eStatements. Why do we need you?"

I almost always reply,"Only 35% of online consumers use portals for online bill pay, and even fewer—between 6% and 16% in 2007—only receive eStatements."

By now, most financial institutions and billing services offer eStatements and eBilling. But most also fail to effectively convert consumers to electronic services, and reduce costly redundant paper streams. Insufficient consumer convenience and confidence are at the core of slow portal adoption rates and widespread channel redundancies. The result of this market inefficiency is invariably a high cost of time and money for businesses and consumers alike.

NON-ADOPTER RATIONALE
Consumers have myriad reasons for inaction, and often blame businesses for drawbacks in their commercial relationship. After all, the customer is always right. Roughly 6% of non-adopters quit using eServices while 23% are undecided (known as “fence-sitters”) and a whopping 71% refuse to use eServices like eBilling and eStatements (known as “holdouts”). Of the “quitters”, the majority stated they could have been convinced to stay and cited shared savings and improved usability – which we will cover in a later post – as significant reasons for staying. While this is a moderate case for PostmarkedEmail, its value proposition is most noticeable among fence-sitters and holdouts.

Notably, 34% of fence-sitters and holdouts don't want to fall victim to email fraud (phishing). Email notifications are a critical functionality of portals storing eStatements and eBills - how else would I remember to track my spending and pay my bills on various eCommerce sites I regularly manage? Surprisingly, this figure is much lower than the average Web user, which has broader implications about the negative impact of phishing. According to a 2008 AOTA study, 61% of all Internet users are afraid of phishing. Other estimates have gone as high as 87%.

ADOPTER CHALLENGES
Despite eStatement adoption rates of 31–47%, the biggest economic benefit of paper suppression is only realized by a small subset of the business-consumer relationships. Redundant paper streams are prevalent across the gamut with only 6-16% of consumers receiving ONLY eStatements. A recent Striata survey provides some insight into the underlying problems. This survey reveals that almost half of consumers prefer to receive their bills and statements as secure email attachments. Over 50% of all consumers indicated that either secure email or a combination of secure email and web portal access would be satisfactory for them to turn off their paper statements altogether.

The results clearly indicate that secure document delivery via email in conjunction with online access to eStatements and eBills best satisfies current and, more importantly, future consumer preferences.