How much time do you spend paying your electricity, water, credit card, phone, cellphone and other miscellaneous bills?
Do you usually drop your water and electricity bill in your local neighborhood store to do the chore for a fee? Do you travel to another part of the city to push your credit card cheque down a drop box ?
If this is your monthly bill payment ritual, you are probably spending at least an hour to make every single utility payment.
But life will become easier with the launch of 'Easy Bill Shop-in-Shop', a chain of consumer convenience kiosks that will collect not just your utility bills but will also accept ticketing, lottery, school fees as part of its bill payment services.
Easy Bill Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of the Rs 7,500 crore (Rs 75 billion) Hero group, has just successfully completed testmarketing its e-transaction oriented products in 150 touch points in Delhi, including grocery stores, chemist shops, petrol pump stations and PCO booths.
It now plans to set up 500 franchisee 'Easy Bill Shop-in Shops' in Delhi and 10,000 such counters across 35 cities in the next 36 months.
"Time is scarce these days. And based on our consumer study, we found that every customer spends Rs 12.5 and one hour of travel time to pay each of his bills," says Sandeep Vij, business head, Easy Bill Ltd.
According to a study sponsored by the company, they also found that 80 per cent of the 1,000 people interviewed across five cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Coimbatore, Bangalore and Chandigarh, consumers preferred to pay by cash rather than cheque or credit card.
'Since you get an electronic receipt end of each transaction, you don't have to spend 30 days in fear if your payment has reached the credit card bill issuer. The whole process takes less than three to five minutes," says Vij.
Easy Bill kiosks, which will soon spill into our neighbourhood stores, will accept cash, cheques and even credit cards through electronic terminals.
At the end of the transaction, the consumer will receive an electronic receipt with a security number. For every transaction like power and water bill, the company will charge between Rs 5-7 and no transaction fee will be charged for credit card bills in the beginning.
Easy Bill has already tied up with utility service providers like Hutch, Touchtel, NDPL, Spice Tel and Punjab State Electricity Board.
The other player, which is cashing in on the bill payment business is Hughes Escorts Communications.