Post Office plans online bill service
Consignia is planning to cash in on the growing use of the internet in Britain by launching a virtual post office that will allow customers to pay utility and other bills electronically through a single, dedicated website.
The service will be free to those paying bills, but billers, such as water and and electricity companies, will be required to pay a small fee on each transaction as well as initial start up costs.
Post office executives, who have been researching the pro posed scheme for around 12 months, are now holding talks with a number of utilities and other large billers with a view to launching the branded online service later this year. Technology to offer the service is already in place.
‘We are encouraged by the feedback we have been getting,’ a spokesman for the Post Office said. ‘We are confident the utilities are going to go for this and are going to want to offer it to their customers. It’s about offering people choice.’
Post office branches already handle 500m of the 4.5bn bill payment transactions carried out in the UK each year and the organisation sees the online operation as a natural extension of that service. It believes credit card operators, mail order companies and insurers could be among the billers interested in signing up to the online operation because of the potential it would offer for reducing the cost of distributing bills and collecting payments.
With access to the internet continuing to grow, around 12% of all UK bill payments are expected to be made online within the next five years. The Post Office says its aim is to secure a ‘significant’ share of that market and to increase its overall share of the bill payments business by attracting small business and other customers who do not traditionally use a post office branch.
Jim Pang, the Post Office’s director of electronic services, said bill issuers recognised the need to provide value added services to their customers.
He said the secure online service – which will allow bill payers to access their bills in one place rather than visiting billers’ sites – will enable companies to offer services such as storage of billing history and customer meter reading.
