New SBT Research with Datos Insights Finds Two-Thirds of Consumers Expect to Pay a Bill in Three Steps or Fewer

A Datos Insights survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers found that 67% expect to complete a payment in three steps or fewer, while 36% have delayed payment because the process was too complex. Of those complexity-driven delays, 45% resulted in missed deadlines and 71% involved repeat missed payments; 41% of respondents reported financial hardship in the past year. Text reminders generated higher same-day payment rates than email across six of seven obligation types, including student loans (43% vs. 23%) and auto loans (41% vs. 25%), highlighting a potential advantage for lenders and servicers offering embedded, low-friction payment options.

Analysis

This is directionally positive for payment-orchestration vendors, but the investable implication is narrower than the sponsor suggests: the value accrues where a creditor owns a large delinquent/self-service receivables base and can prove lower cost-to-collect, not merely higher message engagement. FIS, FI and GPN have distribution into banks and lenders, yet their earnings sensitivity depends on whether embedded-payment functionality becomes bundled implementation work rather than a separately monetized software module. The more direct beneficiaries may be specialty lenders and servicers with high digital-collection costs—OMF, ENVA and CACC—if simpler payment flows reduce roll rates before accounts reach expensive call-center or third-party collection channels.

Near term, this is not a standalone catalyst for public payments stocks: the evidence is sponsor-funded survey research rather than disclosed conversion, recovery-rate, or client-retention data. Over 1-3 months, monitor lender earnings for digital-payment penetration, servicing expense per account, and 30+/60+ day delinquency migration; a measurable improvement in early-stage cures would matter more to valuation than generic AI/payments messaging. Over 6-18 months, frictionless payment design could modestly reduce charge-offs for prime issuers, but it can also weaken the revenue pool available to traditional collection agencies if creditors cure more accounts internally.

The contrarian point is that payment friction can act as a liquidity constraint rather than the binding cause of nonpayment. If labor-market deterioration or revolving-credit stress accelerates, streamlined reminders may shift which obligation is paid first without raising total household payment capacity. Regulatory and reputational exposure is also asymmetric: aggressive text-based collections can trigger TCPA, consent-management, and fair-debt-collection scrutiny, making bank adoption cycles slower than consumer-survey results imply.

Key Decisions for Investors

• No immediate directional trade in FIS, FI, GPN or PYPL on this release; require disclosed client conversion data or a servicing-expense/cure-rate KPI before underwriting incremental revenue.
• Create a 1-3 month watch basket of OMF, ENVA and CACC around quarterly results; favor a tactical long only if 30+ day delinquencies stabilize while servicing expense per account declines, which would support both lower provisions and operating leverage.
• For a defensive relative-value expression if consumer stress rises, consider long GPN versus short a high-charge-off unsecured lender such as OMF only after confirmed delinquency reacceleration; payment infrastructure is less exposed to credit losses, while the lender's purported collection-efficiency benefit would be overwhelmed by reduced repayment capacity.
• Falsify the lender-efficiency thesis if early-stage cure rates fail to improve despite higher digital-payment adoption, or if CFPB/TCPA enforcement raises compliance and consent-management costs; either outcome argues against assigning a fintech multiple to collections-process improvements.