It’s double delivery, with one-third of utility customers still receiving both paper and electronic bills, a redundancy that adds cost, confuses customers and leaves cracks for fraud to slip through.

PYMNTS Intelligence’s Digital Financial Services Tracker, “Fitting the Bill: How Automated Bill Presentment and Payment Are Transforming Business,” finds that electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) is no longer just a cost-cutting tool. It’s a loyalty and risk management play.

Automated billing reduces manual errors, speeds invoice cycles and improves cash flow predictability while meeting consumers’ demand for convenience, transparency and immediate confirmation. Legacy processes, like printing, mailing and reconciling paper checks, remain slow, labor-intensive and fraud-prone, even as most customers have shifted to online and mobile bill pay.