San Antonio Business Journal --- August 30, 1999
The Public Eye
S.A. firm billserv.com unveils bill-paying portal on
web
If you ever wondered what exactly billserv.com Inc. is up to, now
you can go see for yourself. The company's web portal -- bills.com -- is up
and running on the World Wide Web and will soon offer consumers the
opportunity to receive and pay their bills online for a low monthly fee.
(The full address of the portal site is bills.com on the web.)
In addition to electronic bill paying, the site also offers services
like stock, insurance and home mortgage quotes, international financial news
and other services and links. "We thought we should wrap it more into a
consumer financial portal so consumers can do more than just pay their
bills," says David Jones, billserv.com's senior vice president. For now,
consumers can only preregister to pay their bills through bills.com. Some
3,000 people have preregistered so far, according to Jones. Once the service
is up and running, customers will be able to receive and pay 20 bills online
for $6 a month.
Checkfree
Bills.com's electronic bill paying service is actually being powered
by Norcross, Ga.-based Checkfree Corp. Checkfree, which provides electronic
payment processing for financial institutions and financial software
programs, has begun targeting web portals. "We act as the electronic postal
service," says Jan Peterson, Checkfree's director of strategic alliances.
Anyone who signs up with bills.com will be able to pay bills issued by the
64 companies Checkfree has relationships with, including AT&T, MCI and 14
major utility companies. Checkfree is the same company that is powering the
electronic bill paying service provided by Yahoo and other web
heavy-weights. This means that bills.com will be competing with the likes of
Yahoo for customers.
When exactly consumers will be able to actually pay their bills
through bills.com and the other web portals is in Checkfree's hands.
Peterson says he expects the service to be up and running by early next year
at the latest. By then, Checkfree's roster of billers should be even
bigger. The company is on track to sign up at least 50 more billers over
the next 12 months, according to Peterson, who adds that billserv.com and
Checkfree are working together to identify small and midsized billers that
could be added to Checkfree's distribution pipeline. "It's starting to
accelerate now," Peterson says.
Service bureau
Although bills.com, which is wholly owned by billserv.com, is
billserv.com's most visible presence on the web, it's only a small part of
what the company actually does. Billserv.com bills itself as a service
bureau specializing in Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP)
services to small and medium-sized billers. These billers can outsource
their entire EBPP system to billserv.com. Locally based Ultramar Diamond
Shamrock Corp. is billserv.com's largest customer.
Billserv.com spends the bulk of its time working behind the scenes
of the online billing industry, acting as an intermediary between the
billers and the consolidators that operate "front-ends" where customers can
pay their bills electronically, like the web portals. According to Jones,
one of the main concerns voiced by billers who are considering offering
their customers the ability to pay their bills online is: "Where will our
customers be going to pay their bills on the web?" Although billserv.com
can't control what other bill paying sites look like, it can control the
experience offered by bills.com. "We really feel bills.com completes the
value chain we offer (billers)," Jones says. Jones also hopes that
bills.com will help billserv.com attract more investors to its stock.
"Stocks that are more consumer-oriented do better," Jones says.
Small Cap Exchange
Billserv.com, which currently trades on the Over the Counter market,
is seeking approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission to be listed
on the NASDAQ Small Cap Exchange, a move which would make the company more
appealing to both individual and institutional investors. One of San
Antonio's newest public companies, billserv.com went public late last year
through a reverse merger with a Nevada-based shell company. The company,
which currently has 11 million shares outstanding and a market
capitalization of about $65 million, plans to issue a secondary offering of
stock early next year that could yield between $15 million and $20 million
in growth capital. Although it is making progress on its business plan,
billserv.com does not yet have any revenues to speak of.
Online billing, however, is bound to become a moneymaker. An
Internet-billing research report issued by the New York-based investment
firm of Salomon Smith Barney indicates that the nation's 110 million
households each receive an average of 12 bills per month. If 33 percent of
U.S. households would pay their bills online, the potential size of the
e-billing market is $2.1 billion annually, according to the report. |
