Consumer finance companies – such as banks, credit unions (CUs), and auto and mortgage lenders – that are focused on effectively improving the customer experience know where they need to invest to drive growth and can offer information to companies in other sectors.

The majority of billing managers and payment managers at these companies said they believe that one of the main benefits that digitizing payment systems can bring to their businesses is greater customer satisfaction..

According to “The Digital Payments Edge,” a collaboration between PYMNTS and ACI Worldwide based on a survey of 104 billing and payments executives at consumer finance companies that send over 40,000 customer invoices each month.

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Other key benefits that billing executives said digitizing payment systems can bring to their businesses are gaining a competitive advantage (cited by 92% of executives), greater operational efficiency (91 %), an increase in the number of new customers (87%), a reduction in collection times (87%), cost reductions (82%) and more targeted collections (82%).

The biggest barrier preventing them from pursuing this digitization is the lack of technology, with 68% of billing executives citing this factor.

Other factors hindering their continued innovation in billing and payments digitization include employees without the necessary technical skills (cited by 60% of leaders), insufficient resources (40%), high cost of innovation (37%) and insufficient management attention (21%).

Consumer credit companies that successfully leverage their digitized platforms to continue to improve billing processes will better position themselves to meet customer expectations, build loyalty, and improve their competitive positions.

These results will also be increasingly important as competition intensifies in the consumer finance industry and more providers offer innovative payment services and platforms.