AUSTIN, Texas — With electronic billing, much can go wrong in the transaction because of the number of players involved, including bill-pay service provider, the financial institution, the biller and the consumer. Naturally, everyone blames everyone else. While sitting in an “it’s not my fault your payment failed” session at last week’s NACHA Payments 2011 conference, four ways payments commonly fail bubbled up. Take a look below:  

1. Account numbers can be hard to understand. Steve Hooper of iPay Technologies advises billers to prominently show account numbers to be used for electronic payments.

2. Consumers screw up the billing. Perhaps they are “decimal challenged” or even pick the wrong biller to pay, said Mary Zerjav of Bank of New York Mellon. “When the consumer setup is wrong, it’s a chronic issue until someone takes action,” Zerjay said.

3. The bill-pay service providers, in an attempt to simplify payments for consumers, may inadvertently make it harder. For example, they may provide multi-locations of a biller on a drop-down menu, and the consumer will automatically click the first one, messing up the payment process.

4. Billers must provide good statement designs. If insurance companies give consumers both a policy number and account number, errors are often born from consumers becoming confused about which number to use.

These four challenges to bill-pay nirvana point to the fact that all parties to bill payment need to maintain a heightened vigilance to insure a smooth-running system. In other words, the more automation, the better.