There is no such thing as electronic bill payment between banks and vendors in the U.S., with very few exceptions. The reasons are clear: the sender would have to provide the recipient's bank routing and account number, and no recipient is going to do that. Additionally the recipient would need a way to understand what incoming funds were for which accounts.

Sounds like you are a victim of misleading marketing. 'Scheduled electronic payment' sounds to you like the _payment_ is electronic. It is the _scheduling_ that is electronic. Thus they can claim there description is accurate.

I had never thought about the fact that this sounds misleading, but now that you brought it up, I can see how it would be.

Typically people here who want to automatically pay bills do it via the vendor; i.e. to pay the electric bill go to the electric company's website and setup an automatic withdrawal. They you provide them with your info, and you never see theirs.

Think of it as push vs pull. The vendor is willing to pull from your account, but not willing to give you enough info for you to push to their account.

Somebody who works at our electric company, Commonwealth Edison, told me bank sent checks are often late and they encourage people to never use them for that reason.

>>>>FoxInCloud provides the same application support on desktop and Web, and the possibility for additional HTML/CSS/JS features for those who want that.
>>
>>I understand that, and it's impressive. But for the user at the end using the app: apart from decoration, how does the app allow the customer to deliver service better than in the Win95 days? How has the customer been able to transform its own service delivery because of the cool IT?
>>
>>I can give you one example: my US bank allows me to photograph checks with a device to deposit the $, which you'll understand matters a lot to somebody who wanders outside the US. ;-) For years I had to mail the checks, but now the bank has this wonderful technology. But here's what I'm asking: why is a check sent to me in the first place? Why isn't it simply deposited electronically, as it would be in France? We don't want to be too impressed by technology that locks in old ways of doing things. This is where IT is stuck today, focused on old ways of doing things in a different packet.
>
>It was not until the first serious error that I discovered how "scheduled electronic payment" works in the US. For a couple of years before that I was paying my utilities through the bank's web portal, scheduling them just a couple of days before the due date. Then I got some warning to allow for a few days "for the check to clear", whatever that meant. Then it happened - I scheduled a payment to four days before due date, and yet the utility company claimed I was two days overdue. The date on my bank statement was as scheduled, on their it was six days later. After seven months of back and forth the bank didn't exactly confess the error, they just told me to pay the fines (which accumulated to $65 on a $12 bill) and they invented the same amount on my account.
>
>Which settled the matter but I still didn't understand how can electronic payment take six days. I guessed the bank did them in batches and a batch slipped somehow. It remained a mystery until I once switched payments (water vs sewer) which went to different accounts of the same company. They sent me back my check. I didn't write a check... hm, what's this? Then I took a closer look: the "electronic payment" was, well, a physical check, in one of those envelopes with a window or those print-through ones, printed in my name, off my account, sent via snail mail. True, it was printed from a computer, on an electronic (!) printer.
>
>Who knows how many allegedly automatic processes are actually built around manual processes and didn't go all the way through.