Reports out of the US have been finding that consumers are waiting for better bill-payment services before signing up, and banks are waiting for clear market demand before building them.
"Until people demand real-time payments, banks will use the cheapest system around," said Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner who covers online banking.
Some 34.2 million US adults banked online last year, according to a recent Gartner study.
In the US about 17.6 million customers--roughly half the number of those using basic Internet banking services--paid their bills online last year. In addition to higher fees and concerns over lag times, many consumers resist paying bills online because they still don't trust the Internet to provide sufficient security for those transactions.
"Early predictions of electronic bill presentment and payment as a killer application have faded," Forrester Research said in a recent report. "Firms now believe the industry is years away from a critical mass of billers and consumers."
But is this the situation in Australia?
Guy Cranswick, senior analyst at business research and advisory GartnerG2, believes that online bill payment has worked quite successfully in Australia, as part of online banking.
Cranswick said that in the last 12 months we have seen financial institutions pushing their online market offerings, with pricing and fee structures designed to make it more advantageous for customers to do their banking online.
He estimated that the takeup of online banking more generally has been between one million and 1.5 million for each of the top four banks in Australia.
Likewise, Adir Shiffman, founding director of market research consultancy Global Reviews, sees the takeup of Internet banking in Australia as one area that has lived up to the hype.
However, Shiffman said that one weak area remains the ability to totally manage bill payments online -- which means being able to receive and access the bill online, in addition to being able to pay, or process payment, online.
Shiffman also sees a trend in the future being the ability to make a payment online, regardless of whether the company you are paying have a Bpay biller number.
Currently, bill payment service Bpay processes about seven million bills per month in Australia, according to its general manager Andrew Arnott.
Started in 1997 with nine financial institutions and 35 billers, Arnott estimated that it now has about 8500 billers using its services and 175 financial institutions participating. Of its transactions, 53 percent were conducted over the Internet, Arnott said.
It's not possible to truly compare e-bill paying in the United States with that in Australia. Here the system is far more advanced and much easier to utilise. The United States lags seriously behind Australia in it's utilisation of the technology and it's user friendliness. Having lived in the US and experienced the difficulties with ordinary bill paying and on-line bill paying compared to that in Australia, it's no wonder US citizens are avoiding it. They have a very long way to go before it will be useful in the US.