Fidelity Bill Pay ebill question

[The Cosmic Avenger]

I'm trying to switch our everyday checking over from USAA to Fidelity, and one hitch is that Fidelity Bill Pay doesn't seem to have any electronic bills.

With USAA, once I set up the payees for my utilities, USAA started sending me notices about my bills, and so I could set up the bill pay to pay it automatically up to $X (which I set just under or over the highest bill I'd ever seen from them, just to give myself peace of mind that they couldn't just add a zero, as they did to bclover. But Fido doesn't show that those utilities are capable of ebilling, even though I know they are. And it doesn't have the more useful "autopay up to $X" option.

Does anyone get ebills at Fidelity? Anyone else NOT get ebills for payees that they know offer them? I'm wondering if I should keep my monthly bill money at USAA now, as their bill pay features do save me a little time and effort...but that adds up, you know? And I have no particular attachment to either.

 

[braumeister]

They do ebills.

From the Fidelity site:

To sign up for eBills, simply log in to your Fidelity BillPay account and look for the "Sign Up for eBill" link below the payee name. Once established, you will be able to easily view, pay, and file your bills online.

 

[qwerty3656]

They do ebills.

From the Fidelity site:

I've used Fidelity bill pay for years, but never set up ebills. Out of curiosity, I clicked on all my utilities (and things like tmobile, my mortgage, etc) - I could not find a single entity where ebills was available.

edit: ebills was not even available for my Fidelity visa bill

 

[The Cosmic Avenger]

They do ebills.

From the Fidelity site:

To sign up for eBills, simply log in to your Fidelity BillPay account and look for the "Sign Up for eBill" link below the payee name. Once established, you will be able to easily view, pay, and file your bills online.

Yeah, but none of them have that message, and I have gotten ebills from some of the utilities via USAA, so I'm wondering what the deal is! qwerty, you seem to be having the same issue.

As I'm composing this, I get a response from Fido:

The availability of eBills is determined by the relationship between the company and the Bill Pay vendor. Fiserv (the Bill Pay vendor for Fidelity) has established relationships with most major companies nationwide to be able to receive, pay, and file eBills through Bill Pay. Although the companies you mentioned are not currently available, we understand that having the eBill feature will be very useful, and I am happy to enter your feedback to our development team.

 

[audreyh1]

Yes, I have an ebill coming to Fidelity. Works fine.

But not all vendors are available for ebills.

 

[audreyh1]

edit: ebills was not even available for my Fidelity visa bill

That is particularly annoying. If you want autopay you have to sign up from the credit card site. Fidelity will happily take you there to turn it in. I manually do that credit card bill as it is highly variable and sometimes I need to transfer in funds.

It’s actually gone backwards a bit. You used to be able the click on something and get auto fill on amount and date, but now that has to be manually entered.

 

[gt5059b]

Yeah I get ebills from 2x American Express (Delta Skymiles Plat & Everyday), Citi CostCo and ATT/DirecTV. I used to get an ebill for my power company but after I moved it stopped working and can't get it to show up with the new account.

 

[Cobra9777]

I'm quite happy to pay regular bills (utilities, etc) with a cash-back CC. There's no routing/account number involved. Just the CC, which has good consumer protection. For me, it's certainly worth it for the cash-back, which really adds up.

But for the CCs themselves, I'd prefer an automated ebill system in order to push payments rather than having the CC companies pull payments from my checking account, using my bank info which is a CMA at Fidelity.

But I just checked on Fidelity and all 3 of our CCs say "eBills not available." Including, as others have mentioned, the Fidelity-branded Elan 2% cash-back VISA, which we use for all bills and most spending. The other two are the Amazon Chase 5% card, and an AMEX Blue Cash card.

I also checked several other "major" payees in our bill pay set-up, like Liberty Mutual and Verizon. eBill is not available for any of them.

I'm wondering if maybe I need to re-setup these 3 CC payees in the system. They've been inactive in the Fidelity system for 2.5 years when I switched to auto-pay using the CC company's website.

 

[OldShooter]

I would call Fido and speak with a person rather than chasing around web pages. We are with Schwab and ebills are readily available for many payees, including electricity and natural gas. This is such a competitive market it would surprise me if Fido had a more limited ebill resource. It's really all the same thing on the payees' end.

 

[Cobra9777]

Following OldShooter's advice, I called Fidelity. I was told that starting March 1, 2021, they removed the ability for eBill functionality to be added to a payee. This is due to "system enhancements" associated with the overall bill-pay service, which will be completed later this year. Existing eBills that were set-up prior to Mar 1 will continue to function normally. But currently, no one can add eBill to an existing or new payee at Fidelity. They could not provide a specific date when the service would return.

So there's the answer for OP and others. It does not reflect well on Fidelity IMO. Just a guess, but maybe they are changing bill pay vendors. Someone mentioned Fiserv as the current vendor. If so, maybe we will finally get eBill for the Fidelity/Elan 2% VISA. It's pretty crazy that Fidelity's eBill service won't work with their own credit card.

 

[jazz4cash]

Is the Fidelity billpay only available with a cash management account?

 

[audreyh1]

Following OldShooter's advice, I called Fidelity. I was told that starting March 1, 2021, they removed the ability for eBill functionality to be added to a payee. This is due to "system enhancements" associated with the overall bill-pay service, which will be completed later this year. Existing eBills that were set-up prior to Mar 1 will continue to function normally. But currently, no one can add eBill to an existing or new payee at Fidelity. They could not provide a specific date when the service would return.

So there's the answer for OP and others. It does not reflect well on Fidelity IMO. Just a guess, but maybe they are changing bill pay vendors. Someone mentioned Fiserv as the current vendor. If so, maybe we will finally get eBill for the Fidelity/Elan 2% VISA. It's pretty crazy that Fidelity's eBill service won't work with their own credit card.

Great! No wonder the one I added today didn’t let me request eBills even though I already have a different CC working with eBills with the same issuer.

The “enhancing functionality” - really more the user interface - always seems to cause some loss of useful functionality.

 

[Cobra9777]

Is the Fidelity billpay only available with a cash management account?

No. Bill-pay can also be added to regular brokerage accounts or to 529 accounts.

You can add various cash management features to a wide variety of account types. But not all account types are eligible for all cash management features. Here's a link that describes which features are available with which account types.

The CMA is a special account type that comes with all cash management features, plus FDIC insurance and a cash manager tool.

 

[The Cosmic Avenger]

Well, progress....kinda...?

The accounts that had ebills with USAA now say "Ebill eligible" on Fidelity....but when I click "Enroll now", I get an error. <sigh>

I guess Fidelity is having its customers provide free beta testing. The good news is that they do seem to be working on it. And if I ever need another j*b, I could probably help Fidelity plan their site upgrades, because they definitely need help!

 

[Cobra9777]

I just checked my payees in the BillPay section of Fidelity and sure-enough, most of them now say "eBill Eligible." So whatever changes they made are now up and running. I clicked through on our AMEX account and everything seems to be working fine.

But guess which payee does NOT say "eBill Eligible?" You guessed it, the Fidelity-branded Elan VISA with 2% cashback. It was never eligible before this change. And it's still not eligible, which is very disappointing, and rather ironic.

I called my PCG rep and he connected me with someone who was more knowledgeable about this. The person explained that both Elan and the bill-pay provider are 3rd parties and Fidelity has no direct control over which payees are eBill eligible. He had no other specific information or advice. He also did not share my sense of irony that the Fidelity card is the only one not eligible for the Fidelity eBill service.

I guess I'll just leave all my cards as-is. They each automatically pull money from my Fidelity CMA on the due date. I'd prefer the eBill route. But I don't want to have some on eBill and some not. A little disappointing, but the current process has worked fine for many years.

 

[audreyh1]

I tried to turn on ebill for another that finally showed the ebill option. But got “sorry, try again later”!

Yes, still manually paying Elan.

I used to be able to at least click on the Fidelity VISA payee and it would autofill the amount and due date. But now I have to look at the statement and enter it manually! Argh, I hate losing functionality due to upgraded UI!

 

[The Cosmic Avenger]

Same, I saw "Ebill eligible" pop up on four of my payees, but they all give me errors when I try to enroll. <sigh> I figure they're still working on it, but they're definitely not paying me anywhere near my rate for QA/beta tester!

 

[The Cosmic Avenger]

Update (kinda):

I complained via secure message about the presence of the "Enroll now" link but not being able to enroll in ebills for all 4 payees for which it was available. Fidelity finally admitted there's a problem, at least.

I appreciate the time you have taken to follow up with us regarding Ebills for BillPay. I am happy to be assisting you today.

We are currently aware that some clients have this issue and it is being investigated. I sincerely apologize about the inconvenience. We currently do not have an estimated completed time for this issue. For right now, you are still able to pay bills without Ebills.

 

[audreyh1]

Thanks for that info. I haven’t been successful but hadn’t tried again recently.

 

[halivingston]

I was so desperate that I wrote a Gmail Apps Script plugin that parses the email, and then opens up Chrome (using Puppeteer) and posts the Bill payment.

Note, since I do it from Google Cloud I had to enable two factor Symantec authentication so it doesn't show me random prompts and then do it in a way that I can store the two factor secret in my Google Cloud app.

Then I posted the following JSON:

[Mod edit]

{"requestData":{"acctNum":"XYYYYYYYYY","acctSubType":"Cash Management","isMaskingRequired":true,"payments":[{"payeeId":"REPLACE_ME_WITH_THE_CORRECT_NUMBER","paymentDetail":{"amt":"REPLACE_ME_WITH_AMOUNT","date":Epoch_Unix_Timestamp_Of_BillDueDate,"ebillID":null,"note":null,"memo":null}}]},"action":"add"}

A successful response looks like this

{"isSuccess":true,"payments":[{"payeeId":10,"paymentDetail":{"isSuccess":true,"confirmationNumber":"SomeNumber","id":"SomeId","method":"Electronic"}}],"paymentSuccess":"SUCCESS"}