Thursday, 27 April 2023
Paytrust bill-scanning service to shut down 26 August 2023
There’s been no public announcement, and this article is the first report of this news, but the Paytrust bill scanning and bill payment service has stopped accepting new customers and has given its customers notice (see copy of notice below) that it plans to shut down in 4 months on 26 August 2023.
Paytrust never attracted as large a customer base as it had hoped, but it has offered a unique bundle of services that has been relied on by long-term travellers and expats for more than twenty years. I’ve used Paytrust and recommended it to my readers.
As a start-up during the first dot-com boom, Paytrust got US$30 million in 1999 from investors including American Express and Japan’s Softbank. Since then it’s had a succession of owners including Metavante (a large but little-known business payment processing service) and Intuit. There are still legacy pages on the Paytrust.com Web site advertising Paytrust as a sevice of Intuit.
It’s been apparent to customers for many years that little or no money was being spent on further development of Paytrust services. From my point of view, that was just fine. It’s been a mature, reliable system, and didn’t need to be “enhanced” or “modernized”. But it has also appeared that no money at all was being spent on advertising or marketing to attract new Paytrust customers, despite the loyalty of the core legacy customer base of long-term travellers, expatriates, and nomads.
There are services that provide, separately, most of the elements of the Paytrust service. But none of them are integrated to the same degree, and one of the core Paytrust competencies — identifying and extracting billing details from scanned paper bills — isn’t available, so far as I know, from any other service. Paytrust customers will have to pay more for a collection of services from multiple providers to acomplish the same tasks, and it will take them more time and effort to manage and pay their bills.
Paytrust assigns each customer their own unique Post Office Box number — an actual U.S. Postal Service P.O. Box number, not a “Private Mail Box” (PMB) number like those from most mail forwarding services. This has the advantage for expats and nomads of being more widely acceptable to companies that insist on a U.S. billing address. Paytrust retrieves bills electronically from billers’ Web sites or through negotiated direct connections to billing systems (via Metavante or otherwise) when it can, but also scans the paper bills received at your Paytrust P.O. Box and includes them by payee, amount, and due date in its summaries of your bills. If you need more detail about a bill, you can view the complete scan through your account on the Paytrust site, or download it as a PDF.
Paytrust has arrangements (again often through Metavante) to pay many billers electronically, but you can also have Paytrust mail checks to old-school billers who only accept payments by physical check, or generate a one-time check and mail it to anyone. You can link your Paytrust account to multiple bank accounts, designate from which account each bill is to be paid, set a default to pay the full balance or the minimum, and override that default or make a partial payment of any amount (for example, to withhold payment of a disputed charge, which is essential to preserving your chargeback rights) on a case-by-case basis.
Many banks and credit unions can generate and mail paper checks, and there are other services that will receive and scan postal mail, including bills. EarthClassMail dominates this business, especially for long-term travellers, expats and nomads. I welcome readers’ feedback on their experience with them or other mail-scanning services. But any of these services charges more and does less than Paytrust. With any of them, you have to view the image of each scanned bill yourself when it arrives, to figure out when it is due and how much you owe. Then you have to manually re-enter that information into your banking app to pay that bill. Paytrust — and, so far as I know, only Paytrust — has automated that process so that you can pay the right amount to the right payee on the right date, as determined from a scanned paper bill, with one-click approval and execution and no manual data entry.
Of course some billers allow you (and encourage you) to authorize them to charge your credit card or debit your bank account directly and automatically for whatever amount they bill. Using Paytrust provides greater protection agaisnt billing errors and fraud by giving you a chance to review payments before they are sent, and avoids having to give a standing authorization (except to Paytrust itself) to make direct debits to your bank account(s).
I think there is a market for a service like Paytrust. It’s a service for a niche market that could command a premium price. Paytrust had first-generation dot-com ambitions to become a mass-market service, and has been charging US$9.95 per month for unlimited usage — a price that hasn’t been raised for years. Meanwhile, EarthClassMail charges twice that just for receving and scanning (not parsing) a limited number of bills or other pieces of mail, with heavy per-item fees for excess usage.
If you are home often enough to check the mail, having a the occasional paper bill scanned is a minor convenience that might only be worth $10 a month or less. If you are away from home for longer periods of time, or have no fixed address (or none in the U.S.), dealing with bills remotely is essential and worth much more. Paytrust doesn’t appear to have understood who its core users were or how much its service was worth to them. Paytrust never advertised or marketed its services specifically to travellers or expats, although they were always its most loyal customers. I wonder how many of them would have stayed, and whether Paytrust would have become profitable, if it had raised its basic rate to US$50 a month.
For those who haven’t seen it, here’s the message received yesterday by Paytrust customers:
Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2023 14:19:51 -0500 (CDT)
From: Support@paytrust.com
Subject: Broadcast - Paytrust Service UpdateGreetings from Paytrust,
Our records reflect that you are a current user of the Paytrust Bill Payment Services (the “Paytrust Services”). The Paytrust Services are provided by RealNet Payments LLC (“RNPLLC”), an FIS subsidiary. In accordance with the Terms and Conditions set out in the Subscriber Agreement, this letter serves as notice to you that RNPLLC has decided to discontinue the Paytrust Services effective August 26, 2023. Please understand this decision in no way reflects upon you as a valued customer.
Please take any action necessary to coordinate your bills and payments using a different bill pay service before August 26, 2023. After August 26, 2023, your bills and payments will no longer be processed. While payment(s) already processed by the Paytrust Services before August 26, 2023 will be completed, all payment(s) scheduled to process after the termination date, including recurring payments, will not be sent.
Please do not respond to this broadcast communication.
If you have any questions, please contact us at Support@paytrust.com or call us at 1-800-PAYTRUST (1-800-729-8787).
Sincerely,
Paytrust Bill Center
If you’ve been using Paytrust, what do you plan to do now?
Follow-up: Alternatives to Paytrust
Follow-up: Silverbills has agreed to acquire and maintain Paytrust
Follow-up: Silverbills is shutting down Paytrust
Link | Posted by Edward on Thursday, 27 April 2023, 14:07 ( 2:07 PM)Hi Edward,
We are a solution dealing with the transition for Paytrust clients, if you'd like more information about our bill management service then please send me an email! I'd be happy to discuss the similarities and differences.
Best,
Lisa
I have been searching on and off since I got the email, and haven't found anything I like. I've used the service since it was first profiled by Real Simple back in the early 2000s, and really liked that it allowed me to have all my bill history in one spot and not married to a bank. I'm really disappointed they decided not to seek a buyer.
Posted by: Cassidy, 9 May 2023, 12:20 (12:20 PM)Since you specifically mention that you might be willing to pay $50/month for Paytrust, I would recommend that you check out SilverBills. It is a bill management service that appears to be targeted at seniors, but they do offer a full "bill concierge" style service for $50/month. That was a little too expensive for me, but it might be worth it for you.
Posted by: Spider-Dan, 11 May 2023, 09:39 ( 9:39 AM)I have been using Paytrust or its predecessors since the 90's. I was sad to get the email you referred to at the top of the article. It's level of automation was perfect for me. As a full-time RVer, I never miss a bill or a payment. I took a look at Silver Bills, but it's price and level of hand-holding seems more that I need.
I am using a combination of Prism and my credit union's bill pay services. It's more work and I hope it won't cause me to miss payments. I'll try it for a while and if it causes issues, I'll bite the bullet and try Silver Bills. I have been paying $9.95 a month for more than 30 years so I would expect to pay more, maybe not 5 times more though.
If anyone else hears of another service like this, I'd love to hear about it.
Posted by: Michael, 17 May 2023, 12:52 (12:52 PM)I’ve been a Paytrust user since its inception. What was a value to me was not having to manage paper bills. I have not found a suitable alternative. Don’t be snowed by SilverBills. It’s volume based. $50 per month assumes you have a minimum number of bills to be managed. Drop below that, and it’s $100 a month.
Posted by: Tony, 9 June 2023, 09:03 ( 9:03 AM)I am one of the early adopters of Paytrust (back when it was paymybills.com). The service operated flawlessly for me for at least 10-12 years and was a tremendous convenience -- so much so that I repeatedly suggested to them that they charge me more. They maintained their 'charge card' - which meant my monthly bill was usually $9.95 -- an amount which would support no business today -- even if Paytrust were being compensated a few cents from each of the billers it paid.
Silver Bills is an alternative which I have considered. Their monthly bill for the same number of bills paid through Paytrust is quoted at $99 per month. I have less problem with the monthly amount than I do with the possible lack of diversity of service; as mentioned earlier, I could give Paytrust instructions to 'cut' a check to someone or some company on a one-off basis.
For this to be 2023, there is a massive amount of discord in the bill paying "arena". Intuit seems the logical company to operate a full-service bill paying company; but Intuit has displayed its ineptitude time and again on many fronts. I *think* it was Intuit that took an aging but workable Paytrust user interface and updated it to something that is totally incomprehensible.
While I wish Silver Bills all the success in the world, I do think there is room for a realistically priced full-service provider akin to the Paytrust model. (I am not suggesting that Silver Bills is over-priced; I simply have not yet made the decision to sign on with them.)
Posted by: Dan, 14 June 2023, 08:07 ( 8:07 AM)Comments from one of the founders of Paytrust:
Posted by: Edward Hasbrouck, 18 June 2023, 09:27 ( 9:27 AM)Discussion on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1304p8a/paytrust_is_shutting_down_any_good_replacement/
I've been using Payrust for nearly 20 plus years. Heartbroken that this platform will be disappearing into the ether. This technology completely automated my bill paying experience.
Hoping someone comes along and buys their technology and puts it back on the road for maybe 30 bucks a month.
Posted by: Michael Hemphill, 25 June 2023, 19:36 ( 7:36 PM)We have been using Paytrust since it was paymybills.com, too. I agree that the "new" interface from a few years back is user-unfriendly. I am very sad to see this service go. We have relied on it through many moves and many changes. Here's to hoping something great comes out of this.
Posted by: Gabrielle, 10 July 2023, 14:44 ( 2:44 PM)They've decided not to shut down Paytrust. I just got this update from them.
Greetings from Paytrust,
Recently you should have received notice that the Paytrust Bill Payment Services (the "Paytrust Services") were being discontinued by RealNet Payments LLC ("RNPLLC"), the FIS subsidiary that provides these services. We are pleased to inform you that RNPLLC has decided not to discontinue the services at this time.
As a result, the Paytrust Services will continue without interruption, and you can continue to use the services in the same manner to manage your bills and payments. As applicable, mail will continue to be scanned, and your bills and payments will continue to be processed in accordance with the Terms and Conditions set out in the Subscriber Agreement.
More information regarding the future of the services will be provided at a later date.
Please do not respond to this broadcast communication.
If you have any questions, please contact us at Support@paytrust.com or call us at 1-800-PAYTRUST (1-800-729-8787).
Sincerely,
Paytrust Bill Center
Dear PayTrust,
I received your close down email. I also followed your advice set out in your email close down: I have contacted payees, and set up new payee systems.
We also discussed this by phone and emails, and your very recent email to me (July 10) confirms what we agreed to: Deactivation of my PayTrust account- permanently.
Today I received your email that you are reopening (not discontinuing) PayTrust services.
It is too late for me; I have relied upon your prior statements and our communications. I have discontinued my account with you and will not reopen it. I have also opened new accounts with payees and other. If you take any actions regarding me or my payees inconsistent with my separation from PayTrust, I will follow with appropriate regulators and my lawyer.
Very Truly Yours.'
Justin P. Morreale
Posted by: justin p morreale, 12 July 2023, 15:35 ( 3:35 PM)I received a letter in the mail informing me that Paytrust was discontinuing its service. Consequently, I began transitioning my payment processing to another provider. My initial understanding was that there would be no more $9.95 monthly charges after August 26, 2023. Unfortunately, there is no online option to cancel the service.
Nevertheless, Paytrust insists that they will continue billing me unless I call their customer support, endure the waiting time, and explicitly request cancellation. Even though I haven't utilized their service since July, they maintain that they will bill me again in September.
While the impact of a $9.95 charge on my account won't severely affect my family's well-being, the principle of this situation is fundamentally unfair. I am prepared to join any class-action lawsuit on the grounds of this unjust practice.
Posted by: Willy Mena, 12 September 2023, 07:19 ( 7:19 AM)I have been a Paytrust customer for 20+ years. Loved it. Maybe you can do a follow up on what happened with silverbills. Payments were taking up to 12 days to deliver, creating late payment fees for many Paytrust clients. I suspect they were collecting interest on the $ being held at their bank.
I called the support desk and they made it clear they were getting inundated with complaints about $ being immediate taken from the person checking account only to arrive at the payee location 10-12 days later. I have asked them to reimburse me for my late fees charged by payees and the interest they earned on my money for the time they held it. No Response yet but I did get an email they are shutting down Paytrust May 3rd.
To make matter worse, today I received an email they will be charging my bank account $19.99 for April services. So while Im scrambling to redirect my bills and I have late charges on some of my bills, based on them holding MY money, they thought it was a good idea to bill me for April.
I don't know but something is wrong with how this unfolded. Shutting down in 1 month, right after acquiring Paytrust is very unusual.
Posted by: Alex Rohman, 4 April 2024, 11:11 (11:11 AM)
