Silverbills has agreed to acquire and maintain Paytrust

Silverbills has agreed to acquire the Paytrust online bill receiving and payment service from its current owner, who had planned to shut it down next month. Silverbills will take over Paytrust at the end of 2023, and plans to continue it as an alternative to the current higher-priced Silverbills “concierge” bill receiving and payment service.

This is good news — first reported exclusively here — for long-term travellers, expats, nomads, and people with multiple homes who have relied on Paytrust for a unique service: a U.S. mailing address to which all bills can be sent to be scanned and presented for approval and payment through the Paytrust Web site.

Paytrust has had several owners over the 25 years since its founding, including for a while Intuit. The current owner of Paytrust is Realnet Payments LLC, a subsidiary of FIS Global, a provider of business-to-business payment processing services with no other direct-to-consumer lines of business. In April 2023, current Paytrust customers received a single inconspicuous e-mail message that the Paytrust service would be shut down in August 2023.

Yesterday, Paytrust customers received a second e-mail message that “Realnet Payments LLC has decided not to discontinue the services at this time…. More information regarding the future of the services will be provided at a later date.”

“At this time” implies at least a temporary reprieve for those who didn’t read or act on the earlier notice by changing their billing address with each company that had been sending bills to their Paytrust P.O.Box. But yesterday’s message did not mention any change of ownership and, more importantly, didn’t say for how much longer — weeks? months? indefinitely? — the service might be continued. There’s still no mention of any of this anywhere on the “Paytrust.com” Web site, before or after a user signs in.

However, Silverbills’ Sales Manager Lisa Rosenblum has confirmed to me that:

Paytrust will continue with SilverBills acquiring the service. The service will stay the same until 12/31/23…. In 2024, you will need to sign a new service agreement…

You have the choice to stay with Paytrust or switch to SilverBills with our elevated customer service. There will be no pricing or changes until 1/1/2024 and you will receive more information and details of the upcoming changes in the next coming months….

We will be offering 2 services — the Paytrust self service as it has been and then SilverBills for clients who want a concierge service.

The most significant implication of this news for current Paytrust customers is that, if you haven’t closed your Paytrust account in anticipation of the shutdown, you will be able to retain and continue to use the same Paytrust P.O. Box as your billing address.

If you were a Paytrust customer, you should already have changed your billing address with each biller to some address other than your Paytrust P.O. Box. So if you want to return to using Paytrust, you will have to go through the nuisance of changing your billing address back to your Paytrust address. But it would have been rash to have your Paytrust service and P.O. Box closed down any sooner than necessary, since changes of billing addresses can take months and some unanticipated bills might still arrive at your P.O. Box. So most people who were using Paytrust until the April notice of impending shutdown probably still have their Paytrust accounts active, even if they have changed all their billing to go to some other address.

If you have already changed all your billing addresses, and have found an alternative that is working, there’s no need to rush to change your addresses back until you find out what changes Silverbills plans to make to Paytrust once it takes over at the start of 2024. The key question Ms. Rosenblum avoided answering, possibly because it hasn’t been decided, but that is likely to influence whether former customers return to using Paytrust, is how much Silverbills will charge for the Paytrust service. Presumably it will be significantly less than the US$50-100/month price of the Silverbills “concierge” service, but it might be (and probably needs to be for Silverbills to maintain the service) significantly more than the current Paytrust price of US$10/month.

I will continue to follow this story closely. Look for updates in the Money and Finances section of this blog.

Follow-up: Silverbills is shutting down Paytrust