Alternatives to Paytrust

On 26 April 2023, as first reported here, the Paytrust bill-scanning and payment service told its customers that it would shut down in four months, on 26 August 2023.

For more than twenty years Paytrust has been the dominant provider of bill receiving and scanning services for long-term travellers, nomads, RVers, remote workers, people with multiple homes, and expats who need a billing address in the USA.

Two months later, midway to the Paytrust shutdown, what has Paytrust been doing? What should Paytrust customers do? And what alternatives are available to former Paytrust customers or others who need a way to receive bills when they aren’t home, aren’t at a fixed address, or don’t have an address in the USA to use use with U.S. service providers or vendors who won’t send bills to a foreign address?

Urgent action needed by Paytrust users

If you are using Paytrust, CHANGE THE ADDRESS TO WHICH EACH OF YOUR BILLS IS SENT FROM YOUR PAYTRUST POST OFFICE BOX TO A NEW ADDRESS.

Go through the list of billers in your Paytrust account (there are probably some you won’t remember if you don’t review the complete list), and contact each of them to change your address. You can probably change your billing address with most of them online, but some may require phone calls and/or snail-mail change-of-address letters.

If you haven’t done this already, DO IT NOW. Don’t wait any longer to find out if Paytrust will be sold to some new company that will continue their service, or to make up your mind what address to use as your new billing address. There’s a discussion below of some alternatives to Paytrust, but you need to pick a new billing address and change your address with each biller right away.

It typically takes one to two billing cycles — one to two months for monthly bills — to get bills sent to a new address. With two months remaining until Paytrust closes your P.O. Box, it’s probably already too late to get some billing addresses changed before your Paytrust P.O. Box is closed, if you haven’t started the process already.

It’s especially important to make sure you receive irregular and infrequent bills that you might overlook in your regular monthly bill-paying session. Some billers will send e-mail notifications of irregular bills, but some will send only snail-mail bills, and some legitimate e-mail will get filtered out as spam or overlooked. A single e-mail message is not a reliable form of notice for a critical financial matter — which is precisely why Paytrust’s notice to its users has been so inadequate, as discussed further below.

If you know you are supposed to get a bill from a certain company every month, and you don’t get one (because the change of address hasn’t yet taken effect and the bill is sent to your closed Paytrust P.O. Box), you can check online or by phone or e-mail to see how much you owe, and arrange to pay your bill online, by phone, or by mailing a check. Keep checking online or by phone or e-mail with each biller, each billing cycle, until you receive a bill from that biller at your new billing address.

But you may not know when to expect other bills, such as an unscheduled special assessment from a condo, coop, or homeowners’ association. These bills may be infrequent and uncommon, but it’s important to make sure they are paid. Make sure you get written confirmation of your change of address with each biller who you had told to use your Paytrust P.O. Box as your billing address.

If you’ve been using your Paytrust P.O. Box as the billing address for any of your credit cards, and you have that credit card on file with any other companies (for example, to have monthly bills charged automatically to that credit card, or as the default form of payment for an Amazon or PayPal account or with some other e-commerce company), you will need to change your billing address with those other companies as well. Even if the credit card number is unchanged, charges will be declined if the billing address on file is different.

Note also that if you used your Paytrust P.O. Box as the billing address for your credit cards, especially as the initial billing address when you applied for a new credit card, credit bureaus may have that P.O. Box, and not your home address, listed as your primary address. You may need to update your address with the major credit bureaus before you apply for any new credit with your home address.

Alternatives to Paytrust

What are your options if you have been using Paytrust, or need a fixed U.S. billing address while you are travelling or living abroad?

1. Switch to Silverbills.
   
   Silverbills is probably the easiest, but also the most expensive, alternative to Paytrust. So far as I know, Silverbills is the only service that offers a direct replacement for Paytrust, including (a) a U.S. mailing address you can use as your billing address, (b) bill scanning, and (c) integrated online management and payment of all scanned bills. Silverbills appears to be the only company that is promoting itself as an alternative for former Paytrust customers, although their marketing focuses on bill payment, not bill receiving, which suggests that they don’t really understand who uses Paytrust or why.
   
   Silverbills’ sales manager contacted me and told me more about their services after I broke the story of the impending Paytrust shutdown. Silverbills was designed for silver-haired seniors, not travellers, nomads, or expats, but it does offer the same services as Paytrust. Silverbills emphasizes its “concierge” customer service by phone or e-mail, but I got a demo of the Silverbills Web interface for bill review and payment, and it looks comparable in functionality to that of Paytrust, with the same ability to review a list of pending bills, click through to a scan of each bill, and approve or disapprove payment. Silverbills is a startup that appears to be much smaller than Paytrust, and probably isn’t profitable (yet). I think it’s too early to say how well it will scale, or whether its business model will survive. Not every new Internet service succeeds or operates continuously for 20+ years, as Paytrust did.
   
   Silverbills’ prices range from US$50 to US$100 per month, depending on the number of bills paid each month and the number of bank accounts linked to your Silverbills account. There’s no setup charge for a new Silverbills account or requirement for a long-term contract, and they will handle changing all your billing addresses. If you’ve switched from Paytrust to Silverbills, please let me know in the comments or by e-mail how the transition went.
   
   
2. Subscribe to a mail forwarding and/or mail scanning service.
   
   A mail forwarding/scanning service is a common option for expats who want some other mail and/or packages received and scanned or forwarded from the USA, and not just bills. You can set this up with a local private mailbox service, or with a national online service.
   
   Typically, a service like this gives you a private mailbox address, and scans the envelope or label of every letter or package that arrives. You can review the envelope scans online, and decide which items to have shredded, recycled, opened and scanned, or forwarded. Fees for most of these services depend on the number of pieces of mail and pages scanned, and the weight and volume of items forwarded. Per-page and/or per-item charges for scanning, beyond whatever is included in the monthly subscription fee, can mount up quickly. You have to pay shipping costs for anything that you have forwarded, but you can have items forwarded in batches, which can be much cheaper than having each item sent separately.
   
   The advantage of a service like this is that it might, depending on your usage, be cheaper than Silverbills, and can provide additional functions: scanning of all mail, not just bills, and forwarding of mail and packages. The big drawback compared to Paytrust or Silverbills is that bills aren’t parsed automatically or set up for one-click payment. A mail scanning service is a bill receiving solution, not a bill payment system. Many banks have online bill payment services that can generate and mail a check to anyone from their Web site or app, but you’ll have to recognize from the scan of the envelope that a particular letter is a bill, request to have it scanned, log back in to your mail-scanning account a day or two later to view the scan, and then manually enter the amount due into whatever system you use to generate checks or pay your bills.
   
   
   • EarthClassMail is the best-known national U.S. mail receiving, scanning, and forwarding service. Many of my readers and clients have used and recommended them over the years. Their prices start at US$29/month, but your total cost may be significantly higher depending on how many bills you need scanned.
     
     
   • iPostal1 and PostScanMail offer similar services to EarthClassMail, but with lower monthly prices at their lowest tier of included scanning and the additional option of pickup of your mail from one of their local affiliates. This could work out cheaper, if you are only away from home some of the time and are able and willing to collect your mail in person from their local office, when you are home, to avoid having to pay for having your mail scanned. That’s like having a private post office box where you pick up your mail, but with the option of pay-per-item scanning when you are travelling.
     
     
3. Have a friend or family member handle your bills.
   
   You can have a trusted person pay your bills for you, forward them to you, or scan them and e-mail them to you. You can have your bills sent to your home or to a Post Office Box you rent, and have your agent pick up and sort your mail. Or you can have your bills (or all of your mail) forwarded to their address. This puts a lot of work on your friend or family member, and requires a lot of trust from you, but until the advent of online billing and mail scanning services, this was the method used by most long-term travellers, nomads, and expats. Given the difficulty of finding someone able, willing, and trusted to handle your bills for you, you can see why Paytrust was such a game-changer, and why its closure is such a loss.
   
   
4. If — like some commenters in my blog — you’ve been waiting to see if Paytrust would be sold to some other company that would continue the service, as has happened several time before, don’t wait any longer.
   
   A last-minute sale of Paytrust’s assets to another company remains a possibility. But if that doesn’t happen, and you wait any longer to change your billing address, some of your bills may go to a closed Paytrust P.O. Box. Paytrust’s bill-scanning center, assigned P.O. Box numbers, and list of loyal customers would be valuable to any company trying to offer a similar service. But the only company that appears to be trying to offer a service comparable to what Paytrust has offered is Silverbills. I’ve talked to spokespeople for both FIS Global — the current owner of Paytrust — and Silverbills, but neither would comment on the record with respect to any discussions they may have had about Paytrust. If you’ve been using Paytrust, make other plans — now.

Lessons for travellers and service providers

Almost any service you plan to rely on during an extended trip might shut down while you are travelling, possibly with much less warning (if any) than Paytrust has given its customers. FIS Global emphasized to me that four months is relatively generous notice. For better or worse, that’s true. Paytrust’s terms of service require notice to customers if the service is going to be shut down, but don’t say how long that notice has to be, or how it has to be provided. Let that be a lesson: Try to find services that promise adequate notice, by adequate means, of significant changes or termination. Many things can be arranged remotely, but not everything. What would you do if your bank stopped offering safe deposit box services, for example? Changing service providers or finding alternatives could be more difficult when you are in the middle of an extended trip than when you are at home.

While Paytrust has given longer notice than it was required to give, the manner in which it has given that notice has been grossly inadequate. The only notice to Paytrust customers has been a single e-mail message with the subject line, “Broadcast - Paytrust Service Update”. There was nothing in the subject line to indicate urgency or high importance, much less any mention of an impending shutdown or discontinuation of service. There’s still nothing at all about the planned shutdown of the Paytrust service and closing of the associated P.O. Boxes on the Paytrust web site, either before or after you sign in as a customer.

If a Paytrust customer didn’t receive or didn’t read that one routine-looking e-mail message, it may already be too late to get all their bills sent to another address before their Paytrust P.O. Box is closed. If a an address doesn’t get changed, or doesn’t get changed in time, and an unanticipated bill gets sent to a closed former Paytrust P.O. Box, the consequences could range from a damaged credit rating to a shutoff of utilities (perhaps with additional consequences if, for example, you aren’t home to know that the heat has been shut off, and the pipes freeze) to having your insurance coverage suspended or cancelled to a lien or seizure of your home because a special tax assessment hasn’t been paid.

Some percentage of legitimate e-mail messages are filtered out as spam. Some Paytrust customers undoubtedly received the “Service Update” message but either assumed it was unimportant or assumed that whatever the “update” was to the Paytrust service, it would be visible the next time they signed in to the Paytrust Web site. Depending on their notification settings, Paytrust users can receive numerous e-mail messages about bills coming due and other matters that duplicate the information on the Paytrust Web site and can safely be ignored.

If you’ve been a regular customer paying a monthly fee for a service for 20 years, you deserve more than a single low-key e-mail to tell you that it’s about to shut down. That’s especially true when, as in this case, the service is critical for customers’ finances.

Why hasn’t Paytrust given its customers better notice? Did someone at FIS Global make a considered decision that it would be cheaper to defend against, or to settle, an inevitable few lawsuits from former Paytrust customers than to send out some additional, more urgently worded e-mail messages to each customer (with a subject line such as “URGENT ACTION REQUIRED: Paytrust will shut down and your P.O. Box will be closed on August 26, 2023”) and add a prominent banner about the impending shutdown to the top of each page on the Paytrust Web site? Or is Paytrust so small relative to FIS Global that it hasn’t warranted any attention from anyone empowered to make decisions?

Spokespeople for both FIS Global and Silverbills described Paytrust to me as a “bill payment” service. But the distinctive value proposition of Paytrust has been as a bill receiving service, not a bill payment service. It’s easier to find alternative ways to pay a bill, once you receive it, than to find ways to receive a bill if you don’t have a fixed mailing address. I suspect that the mistaken conceptualization of Paytrust as just another bill payment service (which is a recognized category), rather than as an almost-unique bill receiving service, is part of the reason for the lack of appreciation by FIS Global for how critical Paytrust is for its users.

FIS Global is almost entirely a business-to-business (B2B) service provider. I’m not sure that it’s currently operating any B2C service directly to consumers except for Paytrust. That means that FIS Global managers and business analysts aren’t used to thinking about how their decisions impact individual consumers who are fundamentally unlike the rest of FIS Global’s business customers.

There’s a huge asymmetry — also not unusual — between Paytrust’s importance to FIS Global and its bottom line (negligible) and Paytrust’s importance to individuals who rely on it as personal financial infrastructure (very high). It may be that nobody high enough up in FIS Global to have authority to give any instructions to Paytrust has thought it worth the time and effort to think about it at all. Sometimes the answer to, “Why has someone decided to do this?” is that nobody has made a decision at all, and that action or inaction has been taken by default or on autopilot.

It’s too late for FIS Global to do the right thing by Paytrust customers, but it’s not too late for them to do better.

Follow-up: Silverbills has agreed to acquire and maintain Paytrust

Follow-up: Silverbills is shutting down Paytrust