Veco’s over 7,000 third-party agents make it easy to pay electric bills

By Lenie Lectura – May 20, 2018
from Business Mirror

VISAYAN Electric Co. (Veco), a joint venture of Aboitiz Power Corp. and Vivant Corp., now has over 7,000 third-party agent (TPA) partner establishments, making it more convenient for its customers to pay their electricity bills.

Veco, which distributes electricity to Metro Cebu towns and cities, has a total of 7,820 TPA affiliates nationwide to date.

“We are constantly finding ways to make it easier for our customers to pay for their electric bills. The increasing number of locations of our third-party agents is a very welcome development that will help us achieve this goal,” Veco Assistant Vice President for Customer Service Group  Mark Anthony Kindica said.

Since 2008 Veco has been partnering with TPAs to process bills payments in a bid to promote ease of doing business for more than 422,800 customers within its franchise area.

Around 98 percent of Veco’s customers now pay through TPA partners, which include Bayad Center, Cebuana Lhuillier, M Lhuillier, 2GO, ECPay, SM Hypermarket, SM Department Store, Savemore Market and SM Business Services.

Veco bills can also be settled even outside Cebu where these TPA partners have branches. Customers just need to make sure they know their account number and how much is due for the period covered.

This year some of Veco’s existing partners have increased the number of their affiliates which, in effect, also expands the electric utility’s reach for more convenient bills payments.

One example is Bayad Center’s tie-up with POSIBLE.NET, an online platform that seeks to empower micro businesses for digital transactions.

“While we want to partner with more banks, as well as online-payment methods, we are keen on looking for more partners for cash payments since more than 50 percent of our customers are unbanked,” Kindica said.

Veco, the country’s second-largest electric-distribution utility, has earlier shifted the focus of its existing service centers toward the processing of new applications, reconnections, bill-deposit updating and complaints, among others, to encourage more customers to pay through TPAs.