A pair of new studies from InvoiceCloud suggests that one of the most fixable barriers to digital payment adoption has little to do with technology and everything to do with language.
In a survey, the Boston-based billing and payments provider found that 46% would be more likely to use an online payment platform, rather than paying by phone or in person, if it were offered in their preferred language. The flip side is costly: 41% of respondents said they found it difficult to pay or abandoned an online payment process entirely because their language was not available, and 52% said they were pushed into manual channels like phone calls, mailed checks, or in-person visits to work around the barrier.
The stakes extend beyond inconvenience. Thirteen percent of respondents said a language barrier led to a service shutoff or cancelled insurance coverage because they could not complete a payment. After English, the most requested languages were Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Korean.
For organizations that manage receivables, the operational math is straightforward. Every consumer who cannot self-serve online becomes a live call, a paper check, or, eventually, a delinquent account. InvoiceCloud’s separate 2026 State of Online Payments report, underscores how much friction already stands between consumers and completed payments. Lack of payment reminders was the top difficulty cited (22%), followed by forgotten login credentials (21%) and slow processing (18%). Half of respondents said they must look up account or policy numbers every time or most times they pay.
The broader report also confirms trends worth watching for anyone building payment experiences. Mobile remains the dominant channel, used by 68% of consumers, and 45% now prefer it, up sharply from 29% a year earlier. Debit cards continue their climb, reaching 44% of typical bill payments, while credit card usage sits at 27%, down from 37% in 2022. Cryptocurrency registered zero percent.
For the ARM industry, the language findings carry a compliance dimension as well as a revenue one. Regulators have long signaled interest in how financial services firms treat limited English proficiency consumers, and a payment portal that only functions in English may be leaving both recoveries and goodwill on the table. If nearly half of the fence-sitters say language is what is keeping them offline, multilingual self-service may be one of the cheaper adoption levers available.
