Paperless billing
From Paperless Office
Most companies would love for you to sign up for paperless billing. Generally the way this works is that they send you an email when you have a bill and tell you to log into their website to view the bill. While you are there you can pay the bill from your checking account or (sometimes) with a credit card. Obviously this represents a less than optimal way of doing business for the consumer. They can easily have 5 to 15 different sites that all require logging in to check bills. This doesn't map very well to the way people currently use paper. Right now if you get a bill in the mail, you can put it in a pile and then pull it out when it is time to pay it.
A few companies that seem to have a better idea of how customers actually pay their bills send out a PDF of the bill. This way you have a copy of your bill that isn't only sitting on the company's server somewhere. It also means that (if every company did this) your bills all show up in your inbox instead of in a dozen different "inboxes" across various websites.
Of course the problem with sending out a PDF is that you are sending something that might have confidential data over an insecure transmission medium. While on one hand it would seem that email is no less secure than physical mail, this is still a legitimate concern. In particular, if someone steals your mail, you will probably eventually notice. If someone eaves drops on your emails, you may never know.
[edit] Public key infrastructure (PKI)
The problem has been solved through something called public key infrastructure or PKI. PKI is a method of encrypting data in a way that it can only be read by the designated recipient. So if your bank sends you a bill, you are the only one who can view it. Even if someone else gets into your email account, they can't view your encrypted messages. PKI can be used to secure, emails, pdfs and pretty much any type of electronic document. It can also be used to sign a document in a way where it can be read by everyone but guarantee that the sender is who they say they are.
[edit] Bank integration
Some banks offer billing integration. In this type of setup, your bill fr various companies (utilities, credit card, etc.) shows up under your bank login. You can choose to pay it using your banks bill pay function with the click of a button. This is a better solution for consumers because it consolidates bills to one location where they are going to have to login anyway.
The now defunct NetBank was one of the banks that offered this type of integration. The problem is that while some merchants support it, not all do, so there are still bills that don't show up in your banking account.
