Visiting Urs Bieri, co-director of gfs.bern

The office we’re visiting today is a stone’s throw from Bern train station, on the fifth floor of an old building. The workstations are close together, screens stacked on desks, and there’s a lot of activity. A distinguished older gentleman sits at the reception, with posters about women’s suffrage behind him. The employees are casually dressed.

We’re visiting gfs.bern, one of the oldest opinion research institutes in Switzerland. Since it was founded in 1959, it has conducted more than 250 polls. The most famous are the trend surveys: “If you were to vote tomorrow, how would you vote?” The public face of gfs.bern is co-director Lukas Golder, who sits in the TV studio during national elections and explains the figures to Switzerland. 

Today we meet Urs Bieri, the other co-director, who, together with Golder, took over the institute from their famous predecessor Claude Longchamp in 2016. “I’m more of a man on the inside,” says Bieri, “I appear on TV less often because I don’t like being recognized when I’m trying to buy a ready-made pizza.”

Bieri has conducted several studies on payments for SIX. His conclusion: "The introduction of eBill was an iPhone moment for payments in Switzerland". What he means by that: "No one asked for this one solution, but when it arrived, it immediately caught on." It has been possible to pay invoices via the eBill platform since 2018 – and by 2024, 3.5 million users had already done so.

"A new technology has to do three things for it to spread quickly," says Bieri: it has to be "secure and simple and offer clear benefits." eBill meets all of these criteria: 

1. To date, there has not been a single case of fraud or abuse.
2. It is simple: In a study conducted by gfs.bern in 2023, 76% of respondents said that eBill was "quick, easy, and convenient".
3. Useful: In the same survey, respondents emphasized that eBill made their lives easier. The benefits they mentioned were "less paper invoices" (69%), "less hassle" (54%), "less thinking about invoices" (44%), "less e-mails" (22%).

Because eBill fulfills this innovation triangle, Bieri says, 91% of the Swiss population is now familiar with the platform, and 89% of users give it a score between 7 and 10 (1 = "very dissatisfied", 10 = "very satisfied").

Despite the excellent rating, Bieri still sees room for improvement. "I’d like to know why not everyone uses the eBill system," he says. The answer lies in demographics: "Older people are used to paper invoices. They choose this payment method, even if they have to pay a surcharge". He also notes that his mother collects her invoices and takes them to the post office once a month. Will she ever use eBill? "I can't imagine it," says Bieri. Since this older segment of the population is difficult to convince of the eBill platform, it’s currently hardly growing at all. However, demographic trends will ensure that paper invoices gradually disappear.