The number of households using electronic billing and payment is quickly growing.  In fact, “According to the financial information management company FISERV, the number of American households paying bills online has doubled …up from 15.3 million in 2004 to more than 36 million last year.” Source. With the number of people using electronic billing and payment increasing year to year, it isn’t a surprise that security becomes a forefront concern.

Even though electronic billing and payment is now very secure (SmartPay is PCI compliant; if you missed our blog on that, check it out here). It is still important to take extra precautions when securing your personal information online.  Here are 5 simple steps to ensure extra security.

1. If you print off statements for your records, shred them.  Even users of electronic billing and payment may print something off every now and then—and sometimes it is hard to remember to shred the information if you aren’t used to paper bills anymore.  But it is important to make an effort to do this, as theFederal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates about 9 million Americans are affected by identity theft every year .   Learn more about identity theft here. 

2. Never respond to e-mails requesting important personal information.  Phishing and hackers are major, valid concerns in today’s Internet-driven society, and any legitimate company with which you do business will never request important personal information via e-mail.  If you receive a suspicious e-mail, be sure to contact a representative of your bank or of the business for which the hacker may be pretending to pose.

3. Check your online accounts regularly.  It is important to keep an eye on your bank account, as well as any online shopping accounts or other online accounts.  Staying on top of your purchases and information will help you notice right away if there seems to be any tampering with or fraudulent purchases toward your accounts.

4. Keep your computer secure.  Make sure your computer and information is kept secure, and try to do all of your online financial business and bill paying at your home.  Don’t take your laptop to a public place (i.e.; a restaurant, the local coffee shop) to do your bill paying, as there is more risk if you are connecting to a network you don’t know is secure or if you are around a lot of people.

5. Make your passwords strong.  Don’t use the same password for multiple accounts, and don’t write your passwords down.  Make them long in length and very unique; using special characters and a combination of upper and lower case letters helps.  Change your passwords regularly.  Every 3-4 weeks is an ideal span of time, and be sure it isn’t a password that someone would easily be able to guess.

Following these and other simple guidelines will help you keep your information more secure, and will make the use of online accounts and online bill paying much more enjoyable!

In today’s world, it seems everywhere you turn businessesand individuals are increasing their efforts to go green and have a morepositive impact on the environment.  Fromhome appliances deemed energy-efficient with the “Energy-Star” logo tobusinesses starting up their own recycling programs, it is easy to see why somepeople might see the concept of “going green” as more of a trend than alifestyle.

And with this, when it comes to paperless billing andpayment, some people believe just that.  Thatpaperless billing and payment is merely a trend, another way for people to tryto follow the crowd in their efforts toward a greener world.

But  whether or notyou think going green is a trend, whether or not you are committed to making agreener lifestyle for yourself and your business, one thing should be agreedupon across the board –Paperless billing is more than a trend.

Our reasons for believing this are countless, just as ourreasons are countless as to why you and your business should make the switch(check out some of those reasons here.)

But one of the biggest reasons is because services likeSmartPay are web-based.  And the webcontinues to grow day by day.

The web has proven itself to be more than a trend.  According to an interview from Eric Schmidt,CEO of Google, the internet will continue to grow exponentially, especially dueto a “fundamental shift toward user-generated information that people willlisten to more than traditional sources.” Schmidt also commented on how realtime information is going to be key, as more and more consumers are growing toprefer and demand information and power at their fingertips.  And this is precisely what SmartPay gives you–literally.

Instead of waiting to receive a bill in the mail, writing acheck for that bill, sending it back through the mail and waiting for it toclear, customers check their e-mail and pay their bill or invoice with theclick of a mouse.  You can see why it ismore than a trend; it fits the growing demand for web-based applications onbehalf of consumers.  Since this demandwill only continue to grow as the internet also grows, day by day, month bymonth, and year by year, it is clear that web-based applications such asSmartPay are not phasing out anytime soon.

So if you believe “going green” is a trend, that isalright.  Everyone is entitled to theirown opinion, and I don’t think there’s ever been a time in history where everyonewas in agreement on a big social issue. 

When it comes down to it, paperless billing such as SmartPayis more than a trend.  But your hugebellbottom jeans and platform shoes from the ‘70s, or the mesh shirt you stillhave boxed up somewhere from the ‘80s? Now that’s a different story.

What's it like to use SmartPay?If you're not yet one of our happy customers, you might have wondered.

Jennifer Rise shared her experience at last week's seminar, and we're glad to share it with you here, too.

702 communications provides broadband and phone service here in Fargo and Moorhead. They provide data and network solutions for businesses, and digital TV as well as VoIP services for residential customers.

702 used to send out all their invoicing communications on paper. This meant that they prepared and mailed out paper bills, of course, but they also had to manually key in recurring bills each time and send them out, send out reminders, and even make reminder phone calls. 

Automating much of this has allowed the staff to turn their attention to more important and more satisfying tasks.

SmartPay provides the level of security 702 needs (very high) and also helps with customer integration. These factors give SmartPay additional value beyond the obvious one of getting the invoices out. 

Here are the results 702 has seen now that they use SmartPay:

•  Payments received have increased by 21% since they began using SmartPay in August of 2009.
• They're saving an average of $1.11 per statement.
• They have the complete security their industry demands.
• Their response rates are faster.
• They can upload payments and invoices daily, because the process is so fast and easy.

We asked Jennifer "Why SmartPay?"

"Very few systems out there have the type of billing we need," she explained. SmartPay is clean, simple, and modern. The customization gives 702 the look and feel that they want, and integration with the other systems they use was easy.

 We appreciate 702's willingness to share their experience with us, and with you. Now, you can contact SmartPay to find out just how it would work for you. 

Everyone can be a publisher now, or a filmmaker, or a recording company. Thanks to the internet, anyone can also now be very much like a bank or a credit card company, using computer code to create a means of accepting payments online.

Where banks and credit card companies used to be the only ones that could process payments, there are now many other options. 

There are advantages to this. Just as it can be very liberating to let everyone in on the opportunity to create books and films and recordings, it can be liberating for everyone to have the chance to accept payments.

But, let's face it, there's a lot of very poor quality content on the internet. It used to be that a writer, filmmaker, or musician had to be good enough at least to convince a company to make the investment to produce their works. Now, the increasingly level playing field lets amazing independent artists reach their audience easily -- and also lets untalented people send their stuff out into the ether freely. 

Just so, the increasing number of options for electronic payments opens the door for small companies -- and for scammers. People get more accustomed to the convenience of paying their bills online, but also more nervous about who they're dealing with when they make those transactions.

How can your company  get the benefits of the new possibilities in e-invoicing without suffering from the new dangers associated with it?

At SmartPay, we've chosen to stick with credit card and ACH bank transfer payments. You can choose your own merchant account, or go with our partner InterceptEFT, as you prefer. The level of security remains as high as if your customrs dealt directly with the bank or credit card company.

You also have a secure custom portal, so your customers know who they're dealing with and where their money is going. They can check their records easily, and they aren't shunted around from one site to another. They can feel completely confident when they trade with you.

But you also have the degree of control that you want and need. You get the fast turnaround that lets you keep costs down and the high efficiency that keeps your systems lean. That's good for your customers, too. 

We at SmartPay are keeping up with the new advances in EIPP, and we'll make sure that our system remains agile and responsive to these new opportunities -- without sacrificing the security and confidence we're known for. 

Dilbert's question -- "You want me to ask our vendor if his software will hunt down our payroll data from across the internet and try to kill it?" -- is funny because it restates his boss's humorously inaccurate idea about internet security in an exaggerated way.

But there probably were plenty of readers who didn't get the joke at all.

After all, many of us use the internet without understanding it. Many of us, for that matter, use electricity without understanding it. You push a button, the magic happens. If that's your mental image of how something works, then it's no surprise if you have only the faintest idea of what dangers and safeguards there might be in using it.

When the telephone was first invented, people had some concerns that seem funny to us now. For example, people worried that a woman might call a man -- and he would answer without being properly dressed.  He would not, you see, have realized that it was a woman who was calling him! The exclamation point is there to help you reaize that people found this idea shocking and distressing. They probably couldn't have articulated exactly what consequence that situation might lead to, but it worried them. We can't really reproduce the mindset that made this something to worry about, because we have relaxed about phones, whether we understand them or not.

We've relaxed about electricity, too. We know that it does have some dangers, but we don't usually worry that it's leaking out of our light sockets. People used to worry about that.

Just so, those who worry about the security of online EIPP services like SmartPay are worrying unnecessarily just because they don't understand that e-invoicing is more secure than paper billing.They can't articulate just what might happen or how it could possibly happen, but they worry.

We thought Dilbert was funny today. But we don't agree that people who worry about the security of online financial transactions are ignorant or foolish, as the cartoon implies. It's a natural reaction to new technologies. And Onsharp's SmartPay electronic billing system is prepared for that. You can help your customers become comfortable with the SmartPay system by using a telephone option until they become confident about using SmartPay themselves.

At that point, they'll also see the humor in this cartoon.

We recently had a comment saying that medical professionals would soon have no choice of whether or not to bill electronically. With HIPAA and HITECH, the advantages of electronic billing for medical professionals seem overwhelming. We can't imagine why any medical office wouldn't choose to take advantage of the opportunity.

In fact,  SmartPay's paperless invoicing system has so many advantages that we can't really see why any office would hesitate.

But we wanted to know for sure, so we went to an insurance claims analyst at a national insurance company.

"It is true," the analyst assured us, "that we encourage electronic claims for the simplicity and quick turn around, but we always accept paper claims."

We guessed that it was good to have choices, but we were wondering whether, given the simplicity and quick turn around, they might not plan to refuse paper claims at some point in the future.

We had a comment from a reader:

"Excellent post.This is the simplest way of gathering the health information."SmartPay" sounds like a good idea. But...the key, as always is how secure it really will be."

 Security is a growing concern for many of us nowadays. In fact, increased security is one of the many good reasons  to switch to e-invoicing with SmartPay.

First, think about the security level of paper billing.

You receive a bill in the mail and write a check. If you're at home, you put it out in your mailbox, which you don't guard at all. If you're sending a check from the office, it passes through many people's hands before it reaches the mail carrier. Either way, it then goes to a large facility filled with strangers who touch it and pass it along. It goes through more adventures in trasit to the city where you're sending it, with even more opportunities for tampering.

Another mail carrier takes it to its destination, where it passes through the hands of several people before reaching the person responsible for it. That person processes it and then leaves it in an insecure place until time to take it to the bank, where it is touched by many more people. At the bank, of course, it's processed electronically.

With SmartPay, your invoice and payment are processed electronically in the first place. Your transaction doesn't go through dozens of hands, facing the possibility of loss or theft as a check does. 

SmartPay transactions take place at a secure portal. When you think of eletronic billing, you may imagine that your private information is traveling around the internet, available to anyone as this blog post is. This is not the case. A secure portal means that the information goes directly from one server to another. It doesn't enter the same information stream that online information does. It is not on the World Wide Web.

Far from being a security risk, your SmartPay transactions are far more secure. 

What's more, the information itself is much more secure. A paper ledger, a check, a remittance form -- these papers all have sensitive information on them,and few people are really careful with these papers. Someone can see this information and copy it down without your ever being aware that anyone has gained access to the information. Payment systems on a business computer are also available for unscrupulous people to look at, unlike SmartPay's secure portal, where you or your cusomers can see all the necessary data without sharing it with others or leaving it where others can access it.

Computers don't steal money or information; people do. Using SmartPay offers a level of security far beyond what you can achieve with paper billing.