STAR® Bill Payment Service

Replace your check and ACH transactions to enhance revenue for your financial institution and give consumers a more convenient payment method for your retail location with STAR® Bill Payment Service.

The STAR® Bill Payment Service allows a STAR cardholder to pay selected bills directly via a STAR Bill Payment biller's Web site online, telephone voice response unit (VRU), call center or kiosk—either as a one-time payment or on a recurring basis. Migrating ACH and paper-based transactions to STAR Bill Payment transactions reduces processing costs and leads to new revenue opportunities for financial institutions.

Giving consumers more ways to pay also gives them more reasons to do business with you. The STAR Bill Payment Service provides the reliability and convenience that consumers are looking for, while offering new possibilities for cost reduction for billers and processors.

For Financial Institutions

Because bill payment transactions are processed as PINless, they are limited to biller categories that meet a low risk fraud profile including utilities, lenders, insurers, state, federal and local governments, educational institutions, unsecured loans and automatic recurring bill payments. The billers assume the transaction liability and are responsible for authenticating the cardholder at the time the transaction is initiated.

With more and more consumers moving to electronic payments, financial institutions can increase cardholder retention and loyalty by promoting bill payments, while at the same time creating additional interchange and new revenue streams. And because of the recent addition of new loan types such as payments to credit cards, financial institutions can now accept STAR ATM/debit cards as a payment option for most of their loan portfolios.

Maximizing the Value of the STAR Bill Payment Service

By educating your cardholders about the convenience the STAR Bill Payment Service provides, you can start converting ACH and paper-based payments into revenue-generating bill payment transactions.

For Retailers and Merchants

The STAR® Bill Payment Service offers a convenient payment method for many low-risk biller categories, including utilities, educational institutions, insurance service providers, government agencies, cable and satellite providers, rental payments, prepaid wireless, and lenders for credit card payments, private label card payments, student loans, and more. Because these merchants have existing relationships with customers, they have access to information to help identify the consumer and mitigate their degree of risk.

STAR cardholders can pay bills over the telephone - either through a telephone voice response unit (VRU) or by speaking with a call center representative, on the Internet, at a kiosk, or by setting up automatic recurring payments for even greater simplicity and convenience.

The STAR Network continually evaluates eligible types of payment options, such as the recent addition of rental payments, prepaid wireless and new types of loans, including personal lines of credit, etc. These categories represent a large market for recurring payments, and as any new category, they were subject to stringent risk criteria.