To stay competitive, your company needs to provide its customers with a convenient and secure way to receive and pay their bills online. HP OpenBill® Express (OBE) is a full-featured application service provider (ASP) offering that provides electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) and electronic statement presentment (ESP) services. This architecture reduces implementation time and cost since the basic framework is already in place.
Billing information can be delivered to multiple endpoints:
- Your HP hosted EBPP/EIPP Web site
- EBPP Consolidators
- Consumer service providers (e.g., Bill pay portals)
The Billing and Payment Process
We accept your bill data in your preferred output format – such as existing print stream, flat file or XML – and present bills online in the same format as your printed bills. Bill summary and detail appears online in a format designed to fit your requirements.
Customers can self-enroll for the service, or we can bulk enroll all users of your existing EBPP capability to transition them to OpenBill Express. OpenBill Express supports processes to automatically validate users when they enroll using shared secrets or pin numbers provided by you. Users create their own user ID and password. Alternatively, OpenBill Express supports single sign-on as well as a Web Services interface so users can access the system directly from within your existing customer portal.
Your customers are automatically notified via e-mail when the electronic bills/invoices are available, and they are directed to the site to view and pay. E-mails are customizable, using tokens that are replaced with user or account specific information when the e-mails are sent out, providing a highly personalized customer e-mail.
Access to OpenBill Express is secured via ID and password. Users access the service via standard Web browsers, and no special plug-ins are required. The site is secured via 128-bit security certificate. Bills are presented in an HTML format that looks the same as a printed bill but is optimized for electronic presentment. Optionally, bills can be displayed and/or downloaded in a PDF format.
OpenBill Express offers multiple payment options including bank debit automated clearing house (ACH) as well as credit and debit cards. Once payments are scheduled, users can modify/cancel pending payments up until the cut-off time on the scheduled payment date. Users even have access to a full-featured auto pay capability, which allows them to setup bills to be paid automatically based on the business rules they specify.
Each business day, a payment remittance file is generated by the system that allows you to update your accounts receivable system with the electronic payments made by your customers enrolled for EBPP.
Your customer service representatives can view bills, enroll new customers and accounts, change profile information and reset passwords. You can manage system options, audit bills prior to e-mail notification and presentment, manage customer service representatives (CSRs) and view online reports.
The reports keep you on top of enrollment, payment and bill load activity and support automatic updates to your core billing and A/R systems.
Customizable Site Design
OpenBill® Express has a rich set of configuration options that can be set by your administrator. OpenBill Express provides “Design Center” as part of the administrative interface to allow you to maintain messaging, branding and many other options.
You can:
- Select the best look and feel for your Web site
- Add marketing and branding messages
- Configure and add content to other areas
- Customize the content of standard e-mail messages
Bill presentment pages are developed to meet your specific needs. HP professionals work with you to define their layout.
Unsurpassed Security
HP is committed to safeguarding information and protecting your customers' privacy. Application data is securely stored in a database that is backed up each day, and billing data is partitioned using a unique identifier.
At the point of customer contact we use:
- The highest standards in SSL encryption
- Unique user name and password protection
- Automatic sign-out after periods of inactivity
- Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant infrastructure and processes to process card payments
The bill data files that are received from you, and the files that are sent to you, are encrypted by OpenPGP encryption.
Basic System Architecture
OpenBill® Express is architected as an n-tier application. The presentation, application and persistence layers operate independently of each other.
- The presentation layer dynamically presents pages to Web browsers using standard HTML, cascading style sheets and JavaScript.
- The application layer implements business rules and provides content to Web servers capable of scaling to support future growth.
- The persistence layer stores application data in database servers that are also scalable for future growth.
System Interfaces
The OpenBill Express application has three data file interfaces:
- The bill data interface receives billing data from your billing system – typically in XML format – and loads it into a database for presentment to the end user. You can configure the frequency.
- The customer information file (CIF) interface generates an outgoing file once a day in XML format that contains enrollment and de-enrollment information for the previous day.
- The remittance file interface creates an outgoing file in Bank Administration Institute (BAI) format that contains the ACH, credit card payments and returns processed that day.
Built-in Scalability
OpenBill Express was developed using object-oriented analysis and design techniques and Java to provide maximum opportunity to benefit from future product and technology developments. The application environment is scalable. Multiple Java Virtual Machines (JVM) are configured to run as needed in order to support user load.
Choose HP
HP has the flexibility to offer an implementation solution that meets your unique needs. To minimize legacy system impact, we provide you with the option to use legacy bill print streams as input or to provide data in XML format. OpenBill Express is provided as an HP-hosted ASP service.
More Information
Download the Interactive Billing Services At-A-Glance
Download the OpenBill Express Fact Sheet
Download the Statement Express Fact Sheet
For more information about what HP Enterprise Services can do for you, submit a business inquiry.