"Adoption of mobile banking is driving the adoption of online banking services, but bill payment has flat-lined," said Tim Keith, chief strategy officer at the Little Rock, Ark.-based Infusion Marketing Group, which uses member data to identify cross-sell opportunities for banks and credit unions. "If you went back two or three or four years ago, there was a direct parallel between the growth in online banking and the growth in bill payment services. We're still seeing growth in online banking that again appears to be driven by mobile, but bill pay is not growing anymore. It's flattened."

Fiserv SVP of Marketing Strategy and Innovation Matt Wilcox, speaking to CU Times after the panel discussion, said he's seen an increase in the number of bill pay payments consumers are making via a mobile device.

"They're on the go. They expect speed of payment to be faster than maybe a traditional payment type, and so we've seen an increase in desire for accelerated or faster payments to be done via mobile; it's also increased the number of payments being made," he said. "We've seen that mobile is a big proponent of that."

2. Low investment will take its toll.

Marcell King, chief revenue officer at the digital payments platform provider Payveris, said he's also watched bill pay flatline recently. Part of the problem is that many bill pay offerings have sprouted the technological equivalent of grey hair.

"There's been very little investment from the – let's call it bank-tech type companies – who are offering bill payment services. The user experience has been fairly stagnant for the last 10 to 15 years, and there's been very little innovation in that space," he said. Card networks and some retailers today are providing bill pay services directly from their websites and mobile apps, giving consumers more options for paying bills, as well as more alerts, notifications and even rewards points.

"You're not seeing that necessarily come from the traditional players in the bill payment space, from the banking and credit union side," he said. That's opened the door for competition from Venmo, PayPal and other many other members of the growing P2P space – competition that may be harder for smaller institutions to fight, he added.

3. Other products will begin to swallow bill pay.

King said he sees P2P and bill pay merging into something called agnostic money movement or a unified payment experience. Members will no longer have to decide whether to use bill pay or P2P; rather, they'll just make a payment.

Much of that transition is already well underway, he added.

"I think some individuals or consumers are using bill pay to make personal payments today, or payments that could be deemed as P2P, and some consumers are using P2P transactions that could be deemed as bill payment transactions," he said.

King said he expects to see more integration of content from billers' sites into bill pay offerings as well.

"I think that you'll see an experience that allows the user to manage their bills much more effectively, and the payment is just the endpoint of that experience. I like to compare the perfect experience to Uber, where you just get in the cab or the car, you get out. You don't even recognize that you made a payment. It's made much more frictionless," he said.

4. Credit unions will get better at capitalizing on the change.

One of the potential side effects of merging traditional bill pay with P2P and other modern payment platforms is that it can complicate monetization and even reduce fee income if credit unions are combining fee-based bill pay products with free or less expensive P2P offerings.

But there are a few things credit unions can do to counter the potential revenue loss.

One of the biggest is to start shopping around. King said many credit unions are looking to switch bill pay providers so they can consolidate services and volume in order to get better pricing deals.

"Most of the solutions are point solutions that only provide bill pay, or they implement a P2P solution. That's another point solution. They're implementing a business payment solution, and that's another platform. There tends to be a lot of redundancy, additional overhead and operational expense, and in many times a pure economic increase because they're not getting the economies of scale and aggregated volume," he said. Credit unions can also get cleaner, more consistent and more valuable payments data that way, he added.

That's all driving a change in business models for payments providers as well. Fiserv, for example, began offering bill payment, P2P and money-transfer capabilities in a single combined solution. It started rolling out initial concepts in 2014 and its first release was in October 2015. More than 600 credit unions have signed up, Fiserv said.

Second is to use the convergence as an opportunity to up the cross-selling strategy, especially among members attracted to faster payments capabilities.

"You're also moving what could be a paper-based payment to an electronic payment, which is going to increase the likelihood that the consumer or member will use that payment type again. And you're creating deeper engagement with the credit union between its members," Wilcox explained. "Therefore, you're opening up the opportunity to have deeper touchpoints with the member, which could lead to higher activity with revenue-bearing services like loans or credit cards."

"We are seeing some cannibalization of bill pay payments for people moving to P2P," he said. "But as the speed of those increases, the ability for financial institutions to monetize – that is also increasing because you're creating more options."