How Deluxe Bill Pay helps meet business customer needs

As businesses continue to adapt and seek our digital payment solutions, financial institutions recognize the importance of creating a better payment experience for these business customers. As consultative partners, financial institutions need to help their customers advance their digital payment processing strategy to keep up with changing industry demands. Layne Kight, a senior product manager for Deluxe, discusses the features and benefits of Deluxe Bill Pay for both a financial institution (FI) and the business customers they support.

How are customers paying their bills?

With Deluxe’s Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) solution, a customer logs onto to a business’s website and selects the option to pay his or her bill. “What we’re doing is providing a really branded experience that’s consistent for a business’s customers all the way through the journey,” said Kight.

Financial institutions want to provide a one-stop shop experience to their customers and Deluxe enables them to provide that experience. “By having Bill Pay live on their website, their customers log in, they select their bill, and they choose how they want to pay. We've created a solution that's really flexible and scalable to meet our clients’ needs, while still providing that one experience for them.”

How does an electronic bill presentment and payment platform help AR teams? 

Kight explained Deluxe’s EBPP solution is extremely helpful to business customer’s AR team because when a payment is received, they’re not only getting the payment, but they’re also getting the data with it, which is huge because AR teams have challenges with reassociating that information.

“With Deluxe Bill Pay, the business’s AR team can get the payment information via file or via API's. They can get it in real time so that they have a better, more holistic view of their actual receivables and cash position. Whereas without Deluxe Bill Pay, oftentimes they don't have that same type of potential real time view into where they stand. And we're able to give that to them,” said Kight.

What reporting is available in Deluxe's EBPP platform?

Kight said the reporting available with Deluxe Bill Pay is meant to be flexible and scalable. It allows businesses to take more than just a reactive approach. “If they need to do transaction reporting, they can look at whether it's just ACH or just card. They have reports that can help them if they have a transaction that was declined,” he explained.

Business customers can look at some of the proactive reports, like for recurring payments or payment plans, so that they're able to proactively look at their cash flow rather than just having to take a reactive approach and guess what payments are going to come in. With this level of reporting, AR teams can see those future payments, so that they can predict their cash flow in a better manner.

How does an EBPP solution support an FI's deposit acquisition goals?

Kight said that the flexibility that Deluxe EBPP offers to FIs can help support their deposit acquisition goals. “Deluxe’s Bill Pay solution is scalable and flexible enough to meet customer needs of various industries, various sizes and various sophistication levels. …There are a variety of tools in the toolkit than can be selected to really serve the needs of so many different businesses and different industries.” By offering this level of flexibility and scale potential to your business customers, you’ll be in a better position to attract more business customers for deposit and met your FIs goals.

Evolving to meet business needs

“As business continues to evolve and our customers’ needs evolve and commerce evolves, Deluxe has to evolve with it. That is why we're bringing these new digital solutions to our clients because we see the need that they have,” said Kight. “We see the need for efficiency, we see the need to meet their customers where they are and that is why we are bringing this under the one deluxe umbrella and bringing these new digital solutions for the benefit of all of our clients.”

With its complete suite of receivables components, Deluxe is changing along with its financial institution partners to provide them with what it is they need to not only be successful, but to provide the best experience for their business customers as the digital payment journey continues to happen.

^{Source: Kight, Layne. Deluxe Bill Pay Solution Overview, Personal Interview, March 2023.}