Banks Offer Sweeteners To Paying Bills Online

from the slow-to-wake-up... dept

It turns out that banks are finally realizing that there are benefits to having their customers use online bill payment. When banks first started offering the feature a few years back, they looked on it as a profit center and tried to charge for it. What they discovered is that people weren't willing to pay - and instead, started doing direct bill pay online with the various companies that billed them. Now, years later, the banks are finally realizing there is more to business than squeezing an extra dime out of every transaction. They've noticed that banks that offer free online bill pay (and who also encourage customers to use the service) create a ton of other benefits. They're much more loyal. Once they've set up their online bill payment system, they don't want to have to go through the process again. They keep more money in their accounts to cover the bills. They also use less time of bank employees. So, the banks are making a late-to-the-game effort to drop fees and convince customers to move to their own online bill pay offerings. Yet another example of how companies can benefit in other ways by offering something for free - and can actually do more harm to their business when they try to charge for something when people know there are better alternatives.