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Payment Acceptance Cost: A Corporate Journey

Explore the journey of Republic Services in analyzing and finding solutions to payment acceptance costs, influencing customers and the field, and implementing corporate initiatives for better cost management and customer experience.

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Payment Acceptance Cost: A Corporate Journey

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  1. Payment Acceptance Cost:A Corporate Journey The beginning and progress of our continuing journey

  2. Presenters Patti Ritter, CPA, CTPSenior Treasury Operations Manager Patti has worked on payment-related initiatives throughout her career at Republic Services. After an initial career in public accounting, she worked in banking for 15 years in accounting, lending, and consumer loan product development and project management. She has spent the last 13 years in corporate treasury, focused on special projects. Jeff Morley, CFPDirector, Customer Experience Jeff is a seasoned customer experience leader, having served in senior call center and investment advisory leadership positions for a major financial services firm for over 20 years. He joined Republic Services two years ago as Director of Customer Experience as part of Republic’s strategic initiative to become a truly customer-centric organization. He holds a BA in Economics from Virginia Commonwealth University and is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP).

  3. Agenda • Our Journey • How we started • Analysis of situation • Finding Solutions • Solutions considered • Influencing the customer • Influencing the field • Corporate-level solutions

  4. Introduction • Republic Services is an $8.5 billion company operating in 40 states • Second largest provider of domestic non-hazardous recycling & waste solutions • We are not a utility, but operate under many municipal contracts

  5. Lines of Business • 339 collection operations • 198 transfer stations • 190 landfills • 62 recycling centers • 71 landfill gas and renewable energy projects

  6. Numerous payment channels to accommodate the diversity of our customer base Process 2.2 million payments per month Payment Channels

  7. Accept payments by cash, checks, credit cards and consumer and business electronic payments Overall, lockboxes take most payments Payment Methods

  8. The beginning of the journey Due to increasing payment acceptance cost, we began a deep dive into payment costs in early 2012 Analyzed trends in payment methods, channels and payment costs by channel Trend is to OBP payments and more credit card payments

  9. The beginning of the journey Initial hypothesis: the volume of credit cards in our online bill pay channel and resulting cost was our primary issue

  10. Analysis • As we began digging deeper, we found the answer wasn’t that simple • We stratified payments by payment amount and consumer vs. business

  11. Analysis • We are benefiting from Durbin rates on debit cards • A disproportionate amount of our cost is from large governmental and business payments by credit card

  12. Exploring for solutions • Listen to all ideas • Other billers shared their own efforts to reduce payment costs • Service providers offered insight into their client’s efforts

  13. Exploring for solutions • A payment industry consultant helped us focus our analysis of costs and potential solutions • Consulted internal resources from customer experience and IT • Constraints with IT resources

  14. Solutions Evaluated • One major focus was on how solutions might impact the customer experience • Concern from senior management about negative customer reaction and potential defection to the competition • Customer segments

  15. Solutions Evaluated Market reality: credit card companies are aggressively marketing purchasing cards to governmental and business customers

  16. Solutions Shelved Not considered for the near term • Discontinuing credit card acceptance • Implementing a fee for credit cards, or for CSR, IVR or one-time payments • CSR incentives to sign up customers for recurring ACH • Customer rewards and cash discounts

  17. Influencing the Customer • Revise OBP pages to make ACH the default payment method • Improve web site “Pay Your Bill” page • Promote bill-pay and recurring ACH payments in a variety of customer communications

  18. Influencing the Field • Allocate credit card fees to divisions based on actual cost • Provide reports to the field of customers making large credit card payments • Set up a process to give feedback on major customer bids

  19. Corporate Initiatives • Implemented Level 3 credit card data, which qualified us for lower fees on corporate purchasing cards • Suggested invoice messages provided to field • Awareness messages

  20. The Journey Continues • Ongoing process • What’s up next? Share your feedback! Patti Ritter pritter@republicservices.com Jeff Morley jmorley2@republicservices.com

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