Greater percentages of U.S. online households said they used plastic payment cards and mobile phones to pay their bills in 2013 than they did in prior years.
Here are the key data points:
- Mobile bill payment is gaining steam: The percentage of respondents who said they paid a bill in the last month using their mobile phone increased from 6% in 2011, to 16% in 2013. These respondents used apps, text messages, and mobile Web browsers to pay their bills.
- Among smartphone users, the trend is even greater: The percentage for smartphone owners was 30%, up from 12% in 2012.
- Debit and credit cards are replacing checks and ACH transactions. The percentage who said they used a debit or credit card to pay a bill in the last month increased from 33% in 2012, to 45% in 2013.
- Online bill payment was flat: The percentage of people who said they paid a bill online reached 74% in 2013, up from 73% in 2011.
The data comes from annual online and phone surveys of 2,000 to 3,000 people conducted by The Marketing Workshop for Fiserv.
The increase in the use of debit and credit cards for bill payments is consistent with the growing popularity of these instruments for non-cash transactions overall. Likewise, the use of mobile phones reflects the rise of smartphones as people's go-to computing device for getting things done.
Meanwhile, online bill payment was already very popular, so there wasn't much room for adoption to grow.
A likely future scenario is that most people will pay their bills on their PCs and their phones, whichever is more handy at the time. This underscores the challenge to customer-facing businesses – they must offer bill payment across multiple platforms, each with their own user interface and security challenges.
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