Checks Drive 65% of Fraud Losses

The hidden drag on billing modernization isn’t paper alone.

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.

• Sixty-three percent of utility customers still receive paper bills, the epicenter of legacy friction that the report says EBPP can remove.
• Seventy percent of customers expect their bill payment to be processed the same day or instantly, a benchmark that raises the stakes for real-time options.
• Checks were the payment method most vulnerable to fraud in 2024 (65%), underscoring the risk in paper-based remittance flows.

Beyond the headline numbers, the report quantifies how paper persists as a tax on operating performance. Processing a single paper bill costs firms $9.40 and takes 9.2 days on average; digitized or automated billing can lower that to $2.78 and 3.1 days, respectively.

The report estimates that going paperless can trim billing costs by as much as 90% when printing and postage are removed.

Consumers have already voted with their thumbs, as 58% pay bills online and 38% do so via mobile apps; 42% use autopay, which cuts missed payments and collection work. Wallet usage is rising, as 34% pay with digital wallets when available. With 85% smartphone ownership in the United States, the audience for mobile-first bill pay is essentially universal.

Fraud pressures are not hypothetical, as more than 20% of organizations report incidents tied to mail interference, up 10 points from 2022, reinforcing the case to push transactions off paper and into authenticated, monitored channels.

The report also says the double delivery problem can be fixed by making paperless the easy default and improving service communications so customers aren’t nudged back to envelopes.

Finally, it highlights how providers are stitching together the ecosystem. For example, FIS’s BillerIQ is integrated with Oracle to help utilities deliver bills electronically and accept ACH, cards, real-time payments and wallets, pointing to a near-term path where billers meet instant confirmation expectations without the costs and exposure of paper.

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