Fully Electronic Payment Delivery for Pennies per Transaction

Visa ePay is an electronic payment delivery system that routes funds and remittance data from financial institutions that offer online consumer bill payment services to biller financial institutions that provide collection and processing services on behalf of billers. If you’re a biller financial institution, Visa ePay gives you the power to receive online consumer bill payments in a fully electronic format, streamline your consumer lending remittance system, and enhance your commercial cash management services.

A Cost-Effective Solution

In today’s online bill payment environment, the path between consumers’ and billers’ financial institutions is often an unpredictable paper trail that generates inconsistent service, high operating costs, and an excessive number of exception items. Visa ePay enables you to address these issues and provide a reliable, cost-efficient bill payment solution to your customers. Through Visa ePay, online bill payments originated by consumers are collected from multiple bill payment service providers and entered into a single electronic data stream that leads directly to your financial institution. Visa ePay enables your financial institution to receive electronic payments as a direct biller for your consumer lending products and/or as a biller financial institution that provides payment processing services for commercial customers that are billers—such as utilities, insurers, and healthcare organizations.

The Versatility of Visa ePay

The versatility of Visa ePay can help your financial institution improve its performance in a variety of areas including:

Consumer Lending. As a consumer lender, your financial institution is a major payments recipient in its own right (e.g., installment lending, leasing, credit card, and mortgage). Visa ePay keeps electronically initiated consumer payments “electronic” from end to end. This minimizes the number of checks and check-and-list payments you receive and reduces the high costs of exception item processing and customer service.

Cash Management. Strengthen relationships with billers by sponsoring their participation in Visa ePay and helping them achieve benefits including fewer exception items and more timely, accurate, guaranteed payments.

Balance Transfer. Visa ePay enables your financial institution to execute balance transfer payments electronically, providing significant cost savings compared to cutting and mailing paper checks.

How You Benefit as a Direct Biller

If your financial institution offers installment loans, leases, credit cards, or mortgages, it’s likely that you “bill” thousands of customers each month. It’s also likely that a growing number of customers are remitting their payments to you electronically using an online bill payment service. The issue for you as a biller is that these payments often don’t remain electronic throughout the processing cycle, but are delivered to you as paper checks or check-and-list payments.

These paper-based payments require your staff to manually review, sort, and post items—a time consuming and costly process. In addition, manual processing may introduce errors that delay crediting of funds and increase customer service issues.

By participating in Visa ePay, your customers’ online bill payments remain “electronic” from start to finish, providing these benefits:

Single-point access to multiple payment originators. When you participate in Visa ePay, you’re listed in the Visa ePay Universal Biller File (UBF). The listing puts payment originators everywhere on notice that you accept electronic payments and provides them with a reliable way to identify your billers and the account number formats and edits they require. This means that payment originators are more likely to send you payments electronically, increasing the number and cost efficiency of the payments you receive.

Lower remittance processing costs. Receiving online consumer bill payments in a fully electronic format costs pennies per transaction, compared to paper check processing costs of $1.00 to $1.50 per item.¹

Fewer exception items. Visa ePay significantly reduces check-and-list items, minimizing exception items and making remittance processing more cost effective, particularly for high-volume payment processors.

Fewer customer service inquiries. Visa ePay helps reduce the high number of customer service calls resulting from “non-standard” payments. And, if a transaction requires research, Visa ePay makes it easy to retrieve transaction detail for fast resolution and responsiveness to your customers’ inquiries.

Guaranteed funds. For every Visa ePay payment, funds are secured by your customers’ financial institutions before payment messages are sent to your financial institution. Authorization and settlement in “good funds” provide payment assurance and one-time processing that conventional remittance can’t match.

Faster funds availability. Visa ePay adds speed and efficiency to the online consumer bill payment process. Participating in Visa ePay accelerates the receipt of payments and accounts receivable data. Settlement is typically completed in less than 24 hours.

Minimize processing errors. Visa ePay automatically validates customer account information according to the requirements specified in the Visa ePay UBF, eliminating non-postable items and minimizing delayed and incorrect postings that can negatively affect customer service and satisfaction.

Maximize electronic payments with reversibility. Visa ePay provides a reversible settlement option to eliminate expensive manual processing when a payment originator requests that you return an item. When you accept electronic reversals, payment originators are likely to increase the volume of electronic payments they send to you, further increasing the number and cost efficiency of the payments you receive.

Your Financial Institution as a Cash Management Service Provider

Visa ePay provides the opportunity for you to offer commercial cash management customers a solution to the challenges of online consumer bill payments, particularly exception items resulting from conversion of electronic payments to paper checks or check-and-list items. Visa ePay reduces your cash management customers’ exception item processing by delivering their customers’ online bill payments in a standardized, content-rich, electronic format that supports efficient, cost-effective electronic posting and simplifies follow-up research.

When you support Visa ePay for your cash management customers, you help them achieve these benefits:

Reduce payment processing costs. Receiving online consumer bill payments in a fully electronic format costs pennies per transaction, compared to paper check processing costs of $1.00 to $1.50 per item.

Avoid customer service issues. Visa ePay helps reduce the high number of customer service issues that are often the result of electronic payments converted to paper checks or check-and-list items.

Strengthen corporate relationships and build loyalty. Offering Visa ePay can help you build loyalty and strengthen relationships with cash management customers, because the service provides a turnkey solution that minimizes exception items typically associated with online consumer bill payment processing.

Generate new business. Expanding your electronic lockbox and concentration services with Visa ePay, a solutions-based service that differentiates you from competitors, can help attract new cash management customers.

Balance Transfers

Visa ePay enables you to originate electronic payment transactions to pay off balances of other credit cards (e.g., department store cards and gas cards) during the balance transfer process, instead of cutting and mailing paper checks.

Visa ePay Credit Counseling Automation Service

The Visa ePay Credit Counseling Service links to consumer credit counseling agencies nationwide, enabling participating creditors/billers to negotiate Debt Management Proposals (DMPs) and receive payments electronically.*

As a biller financial institution, you can use Visa ePay to streamline your workflow with participating credit counseling agencies, helping you achieve these significant cost and operational benefits:

Reduce processing costs. Replace high-cost paper processing with payments delivered in a standard electronic format for efficient, cost-effective automated posting and simplified follow-up.

Improve operational efficiencies. Reduce time-consuming paperwork and the high number of customer service calls associated with processing paper proposals.

Post payments faster. No more waiting for mail or special handling; electronic payments post quickly and accurately.

Save time and labor. The shorter and more efficient approval cycle for electronically negotiated DMPs reduces manpower requirements and enables debtors to begin repayment sooner. In addition, creditors can automatically accept DMPs that meet pre-defined acceptance criteria.

Eliminate Fair Share invoicing. Net and gross fields allow consumer credit counseling agency clients’ records to be credited with gross payments, while the agency settles in net payments—minimizing paperwork, record keeping, and additional payments processing.

Consolidate correspondence. Electronic communications using free-form messages provide a convenient audit trail—no more lost information.

Discourage bankruptcies. Faster, more efficient, hassle-free service encourages debtors to stay with their DMPs and discourages bankruptcy as an option.

For More Information

For more information, please call your Visa Account Executive or Contact Us.