Financial services tech firm Fiserv this week formed a new group focused on electronic bill payments.

Chief Operating Officer Mark Ernst told Banker & Tradesman that this new group will focus specifically on payments made not at the point of sale – for example, cable or phone bill payments.

"A lot of the current buzz is all around payments at the point of sale, things like Apple Pay and EMV … That is about half of the payments that occur in the United States. The other half are these 55 billion transactions that we generally don’t talk about and are disproportionately still done by having somebody write a check and put it in an envelope and put it in the mail," he said. "We think there’s a big, big opportunity to turn that into an electronic transaction for more and more people."

The company also appointed Kevin Schultz the head of the payments group.

Ernst identified a few hurdles that Fiserv, and certainly other financial tech companies, will have to clear to achieve critical mass in this distinction.

First, he said, most people still receive their bills in paper form. Electronic bill presentment, rather than a mailed paper bill, might be one solution to this issue.

"We also know that for a lot of consumers, the thing that keeps them from making an electronic payment is that they want the certainty of the payment," Ernst said.

Ergo, the new payments group will also have to work on better confirmation of electronic payments.

And finally, he said, "It really has to work for any type of payment somebody wants to make. If you want to pay your gardener or your friend, they generally are not as electronically prepared as AT&T. A big part of the challenge is how can we reach out to those smaller billers and enable the network to work for payments for anybody who’s in a position to receive money."