eBill: The Secure Way to Issue – and Pay – an Invoice

How do you do your invoicing? It’s a trivial question than nonetheless can have a big impact on your business.

• Do you print QR-bills and mail them through the postal service? If you do, a study by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts says that you’ve chosen an expensive way to invoice that can even involve additional costs in the end. But presumably some of your customers wish to continue receiving hard-copy bills that they then pay at the post office.
• Do you dispatch bills by e-mail? How often have your customers overlooked or forgotten a bill? According to the study cited above, this payment route is more error-prone and is unreliable and inefficient. Its only advantage is that it’s very convenient: just hit “send” on the e-mail and done.
• Or do you invoice your customers via eBill? Then you’ve chosen the most efficient payment route. And eBill scores well in the study to boot, ranking in first or second place in all of the categories examined. No wonder the payment platform has caught on so quickly: introduced in 2018, today eBill is already trusted by over 3.5 million users and by practically every invoice issuer in Switzerland.  

But what makes eBill so good that half of all households in Switzerland have adopted this solution in record time (this milestone was already reached in 2022) and a whopping 89% of all people who use eBill are “rather” or “very” satisfied with it?

The most appreciated advantages of eBill have to do with the hands-on use of them: “fast, easy, and convenient” (76%), “less paper” (69%), and “less work” (54%), commented survey respondents in a study conducted by the renowned opinion research institute gfs.bern. The responses are understandable: nobody enjoys paying bills, so any simplification of the process is gratefully received.

eBill invoices get sent directly to recipients’ e-banking portal, where they need only to check and approve them for payment online. In contrast to e-mail invoices, with eBill there’s no need to enter the payee details and the reference number manually on the e-banking portal. Although e-mail invoices can also be scanned in, paying them isn’t a seamless process because the e-mail and e-banking applications both need to be opened and use of two devices may even be necessary under certain circumstances.

Ever since the advent of online banking and e-mail, it has made sense to send invoices digitally. E-mail invoices cost practically nothing to send (aside from indirect expenses such as for electricity and infrastructure) and completely eliminate printing and postage costs. That sounds attractive from an invoice issuer’s perspective. But this route also harbors some pitfalls: invoices end up in spam folders or simply get forgotten about. And in the phishing era, in which people receive scam e-mails every day, the security of e-mails as a billing channel is questionable anyway.

eBill indeed provides a safe channel for paying bills – the aforementioned study by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts comes to the same conclusion. In contrast to other payment methods, there has been no known case of fraud involving eBill to date. Transactions on the eBill platform are encrypted end-to-end: a bill can only be viewed by the verified company issuing the invoice and the customer receiving it. And there is no media discontinuity – the eBill ecosystem is a seamless, protected system. Therefore, no one can trick eBill recipients into logging in and divulging their data on a fake portal.

Another vital security aspect of eBill is the delivery of invoices directly to customers’ online banking apps. Your customers have the invoice at their fingertips right when they’re in a secure environment. It takes just two to three clicks to make the payment: invoice recipients do not have to enter any IBAN numbers, scan in any QR codes, or type in any payment amounts manually. The probability of a payment error is practically zero.

eBill employs all of the advantages of digitization and creates a convenient environment that makes it easier to deal with the often-tedious task of managing bills because not only is paying simple with eBill, the system also archives and provides an overview of all paid invoices. Standing payment orders are also possible with eBill.

The largest invoice issuers in Switzerland put their trust today in the eBill platform, which SIX develops and operates on behalf of the Swiss banking industry. Invoice issuers appreciate the tremendous convenience and reduced hassle of electronic billing compared to other payment methods just as much as eBill users do. The greater dependability of bill paying also reduces support overhead, resulting in considerable cost savings for invoice issuers in the long run. It also benefits business cash flow: there are very few overdue notices with eBill – most customers, in fact, pay their bills well ahead of the payment deadline. In contrast, an internal inquiry conducted by the Swiss Federal Railways company – one of the largest invoice issuers in Switzerland – found that no other billing method results in more overdue notices than invoicing by e-mail does.