How Electronic Lockbox Helps Manage Recurring Payment Exceptions

Recurring online banking bill pay is designed to make payments easy for consumers. Once a payment is set up, the instructions may stay in place for months or even years. However, account information doesn’t always stay the same.

When a loan or account number changes following a system conversion, merger, or acquisition, stored bill pay instructions may continue sending the outdated information with each payment. For operations teams, the result can be the same exception month after month.

CheckAlt’s Electronic Lockbox can help address that challenge by giving organizations a way to manage recurring payment exceptions and retain known corrections, reducing the need to repeatedly resolve an issue that’s already been identified.

In this article:

• Why recurring online banking bill pay payments can create repeat exceptions
• How account or loan number changes can lead to recurring manual corrections
• How CheckAlt’s Electronic Lockbox can help retain and apply known corrections
• How better exception handling can reduce repetitive work and support payment continuity

When Account Information Changes but Payment Instructions Don’t

Consumers generally don’t think about what happens behind the scenes after they set up a recurring bill payment. If the payment has been working, there’s little reason to revisit the instructions. This becomes an issue when something changes on the receiving side.

For example, a consumer set up a recurring online banking bill pay payment for a loan. Following a merger, acquisition, or system conversion, the loan number changes. The consumer may continue initiating payments using the original loan number because it’s still stored in their bank or credit union’s bill pay system. The payment continues to arrive, but the information accompanying it no longer matches the account information the receiving organization needs to post it correctly, resulting in a payment exception.

One Account Change Can Create a Recurring Exception

The first time an outdated account number appears and causes an exception, an operations employee can research the payment, identify the correct account, update the information, and apply the payment appropriately.

The problem is what happens with the next payment.

Unless the consumer updates their stored bill pay instructions, the next payment may arrive with the same outdated account number. The operations team is then faced with an exception it has already researched and resolved. And because many online banking bill pay payments are recurring, the cycle can continue month after month.

A single account number change can create an ongoing source of manual work, especially when an organization is managing changes across a larger group of customers or accounts.

The challenge isn’t simply resolving the exception; it’s finding a way to avoid manually resolving the same known exception every time the payment arrives.

How Electronic Lockbox Helps Manage Payment Exceptions

Electronic lockbox helps keep eligible online banking bill pay payments electronic, but its role can extend beyond how the payment is delivered.

CheckAlt’s Electronic Lockbox can also apply processing rules to incoming payments and route transactions that require attention to an exception workflow, which becomes especially useful when payment information has changed.

When a payment arrives with an outdated account or loan number, the operations team can review the exception and identify the correct information. Once that takes place, CheckAlt’s “Remember Me” functionality can retain the correction so that the organization doesn’t have to start from scratch the next time the same payment instructions appear. As a result, future payments containing that known information can be recognized and corrected automatically.

Instead of researching the same exception every month, the Electronic Lockbox workflow can apply what the organization already knows, reducing repeated manual corrections across multiple payments and accounts.

Less Repetitive Work, Better Payment Continuity

For operations teams, the immediate benefit of retaining and automatically applying known corrections is straightforward: fewer repetitive corrections. Employees can spend less time researching exceptions they’ve already resolved and focus their attention on transactions that genuinely require investigation.

There’s also a benefit for the consumer. A person who has established a recurring payment expects it to continue working. They may have no visibility into an account number change or system conversion happening behind the scenes. Managing known exceptions efficiently can help payments continue reaching the appropriate account even when the information stored in the consumer’s bill pay instructions hasn’t caught up with the change.

What to Consider When Managing Recurring Payment Exceptions

For organizations receiving recurring online banking bill pay payments, it’s worth looking beyond how an exception is resolved the first time and considering what happens when it returns. A few questions can help identify opportunities to reduce repetitive work:

• How are recurring payment exceptions identified and routed for review?
• Can known corrections be retained and applied to future payments?
• How easily can teams see and resolve exceptions?
• What controls and audit history are available around those corrections?

The goal is simple: once an organization has done the work to resolve a known exception, it shouldn’t have to repeat that same work indefinitely.

Hear More About Electronic Lockbox and Online Banking Bill Pay

CheckAlt’s Electronic Lockbox can help organizations keep eligible online banking bill pay payments electronic while also providing tools to manage the exceptions that occur along the way.

For a deeper look, listen to Wespay’s Payments Perspective Podcast featuring CheckAlt’s Jen Sauers. The conversation explores why some online banking bill pay payments still become paper checks, how Electronic Lockbox works, and how organizations can manage recurring payment exceptions and account changes more efficiently.

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