VECO eyes mobile, electronic bill collections system

NUMEROUS complaints about long queues of customers transacting business at their existing offices such as the SM City Cebu office have prompted the Visayan Electric Co. (VECO) to consider going mobile and electronic in the customers’ bills payment process.

Anton Mari Perdices, VECO chief operating officer, said the company’s direction is to eventually go mobile and electronic where customers will get and pay their bills electronically.

“We don’t want our customers to wait in line at service centers for 30 minutes because we know their time is precious. They have many options where to pay so we offer them alternatives,” Perdices said.

In line with this thrust, the power distribution company is aiming to have 100 percent of its customers to pay their bills through their authorized collecting partners by 2017.

Bong Saniel, VECO head for revenue management, said that 73 percent or around 293,000 customers within their franchise area transact with existing Third Party Agents (TPA).

“Our goal is to bring this to 100 percent by next year,” he said during a press conference on Monday.

Existing offices, such as that in SM City Cebu, will no longer accept payments starting next year.

Instead of traveling to VECO offices to pay their electric bills, customers have more options of where to transact with over 14 TPAs all over Cebu, some of which have more than 1,000 branches all over the country.

The distribution utility has partnered with Bayad Center, Cebuana Lhuillier, M Lhuillier, 2GO, ECPay, SM Hypermarket, SM Department Store, Savemore Market and SM Business Services to allow customers to transact.

Banks such as BDO, Metrobank, Bank of Commerce, RCBC, and Unionbank are also authorized collecting partners.

“There’s no longer a need for our customers to travel far to get to our organic offices because they can already pay at the nearest collection partner branches,” said Saniel.