Fully Electronic Payment Delivery for Pennies per Transaction

Visa ePay is an electronic payment delivery system that routes funds and remittance data from payment originators 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 payment originator, Visa ePay can help you reduce costs, create revenue-generating opportunities, enhance customer service, and streamline back-office operations.

A Cost-Effective Solution

If your financial institution offers an online consumer bill payment service or if you’re a bill payment service provider, you are an “originator” of payments. And, if you are a typical payment originator, many billers are not able to accept electronic payments from you directly, requiring you to covert your customers’ online payments into paper checks or check-and-list items. These converted checks or check-and-list items significantly undermine the cost effectiveness of your online consumer bill payment service and degrade its speed and operational efficiency. Visa ePay puts you back in control of the payments you originate with a reliable, fully electronic solution utilizing the Visa ePay Universal Biller File (UBF), an industry-wide standard for routing electronic payment transactions. The UBF reliably identifies billers that accept electronic payments and accurately establishes billers’ required account number formats and edits. Using the Visa ePay UBF enables you to increase your electronic payment volume, avoid the cost of building your own biller identification system, as well as developing and maintaining biller files.

Reducing Exception Items in Payment Processing

If you’re operating without the benefit of Visa ePay, it’s likely that you’re converting a significant percentage of your customers’ online bill payments into paper checks or check-and-list items that billers can accept. This conversion process negatively affects the cost and efficiency of your service by:

Increasing costs. Cutting and delivering paper checks or check-and-list items are substantially more expensive than transmitting electronic items.

Delaying posting. Paper checks or check-and-list items add significantly to payment processing time and force billers to handle payments as exception items. Added processing time can delay biller posting, with potential adverse effects for your customers.

Creating customer service issues. Delayed and inaccurate posting of exception items by billers can create customer service issues for which you may be held accountable—decreasing customer confidence in your online bill payment service and driving up your customer service costs.

How You Benefit as a Payment Originator

Increase electronic payment volume. With a single connection to Visa ePay, you can access multiple billers online, enabling you to increase the volume of payments you present electronically.

Lower remittance processing costs. Sending more payments electronically means reduced check processing and customer service costs.

Increase customer satisfaction. Visa ePay enhances the speed, accuracy, and reliability of online bill payment services—minimizing late and inaccurate payment postings and increasing customer satisfaction with your online bill payment service.

Enhance efficiency and control. By incorporating Visa communications and processing protocol capabilities, Visa ePay provides the technical platform for a fully electronic, bi-directional link between the consumer financial institution and the biller financial institution. Payment delays, costly paper checks, and exception item processing are replaced with standardized electronic transactions. And, Visa ePay automatically edits customer account information according to billers’ requirements specified in the Visa ePay UBF.

Increase operational certainty. Operational regulations govern the rights and responsibilities of all participants in Visa ePay and specify the flow and content of online bill payment messages. These rules and conditions bring operational certainty to remittance processing. In addition, the Visa ePay infrastructure includes procedures for exception item handling and dispute resolution, and facilitates electronic tracking of transactions requiring research.

Maximize electronic payments with reversibility. Visa ePay provides an electronic reversible settlement option to eliminate expensive manual processing when you request that a biller return an item drawn on insufficient funds. With fully electronic reversals, you can increase your electronic payment volume, while minimizing the time that unfunded transactions are outstanding.

Balance Transfers

Visa ePay also enables financial institutions to originate 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 sending checks.

For More Information

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