The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Selects Billserv, Inc. to Provide Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment Services
Residents of San Francisco and several surrounding Bay Area counties will soon enjoy the convenience of receiving and paying their service bills over the Internet with the widest available selection of sites to choose from
San Antonio, February 26, 2001 - Billserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: BLLS), the leading electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) Outsourced Solution Provider, today announced it has signed a multi-year agreement with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) to provide an EBPP solution that will enable the SFPUC to distribute more than one million bills annually to its customers via the Internet.
With Billserv's end-to-end EBPP solution, SFPUC will now have the ability to present its customers' bills electronically at every bank, Internet portal (such as the United States Postal Service, Yahoo!, MS Money, Quicken and bills.com, Billserv's own bill payment portal), and billing aggregation site available in Billserv's broad network of alliances, with Billserv serving as the single point of contact. The SFPUC will transmit its billing data to Billserv and Billserv will translate and securely distribute the data to the various points of contact for presentment and payment. Customers of the SFPUC will benefit from the convenience of receiving and paying their service bills online by saving time and money month after month.
"The SFPUC's decision to adopt an EBPP solution demonstrates innovation and technology leadership in the growing Internet billing marketplace," said Michael Long, chairman and CEO of Billserv. "Working with the SFPUC supports Billserv's epiCenter local marketing model, where we target regions of high Internet volume and work to bring a number of billers online, thus positively impacting adoption rates. The SFPUC will act as the anchor biller in the San Francisco and surrounding Bay Area, further demonstrating their important role in the Internet marketplace," continued Long.
"The SFPUC is committed to achieving the highest level of customer satisfaction," said Bill Berry, SFPUC Assistant General Manager for Finance and Administration. "We believe that providing customers with choices about how and where they may make their payments contributes to customer convenience and in turn increases customer satisfaction. From conventional to high tech, customers make the choice."
With a service bureau model that offers companies a complete, outsourced EBPP solution including integrated Internet-based customer care, Billserv serves a strategic and pivotal role for companies looking to participate in the Internet billing marketplace. Companies stand to benefit from the dramatic reduction of costs associated with implementing and maintaining an electronic bill presentment and payment strategy, and from increased consumer adoption rates as a result of Billserv's comprehensive marketing support.
Billserv now has 39 biller relationships contracted, representing 52 billers. Of the 52 billers, 33 are in a production environment with the remaining 19 in various stages of implementation. Billserv's customer base totals approximately 3 billion paper bills annually, which equates to 15 percent of all paper bills produced in the United States each year.
About The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is a subdivision of the City & County of San Francisco. The PUC provides retail drinking water and sewer services to San Francisco, wholesale water to three other Bay Area Counties, and hydroelectric power to City government operations. The PUC provides retail water service to 770,000 San Francisco customers, and wholesale water to 1.6 million suburban customers served by 30 wholesale agencies in San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda counties.
About Billserv, Inc.
Billserv, Inc. is the leading electronic bill presentment and payment Outsourced Solution Provider that provides billers with a cost-effective, integrated solution for presenting bills to consumers for payment on the Internet. Billserv serves an intermediary role between billers and bill aggregators by consolidating customer billing information from multiple billers, and then securely delivering it to aggregators and to the client's own payment site, hosted by Billserv. The company has relationships with all major EBPP consolidators, including CheckFree, Spectrum, MasterCard RPPS, Paytrust, CyberBills and BillingZone. For additional information, visit <http://www.billserv.com/> or call (210) 402-5000.
With the exception of historical information contained in this release, this release includes forward-looking statements made under the "Safe Harbor'' provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements.
Investor Relations Contact:
Jack Roney
(210) 402-5160
jack.roney@billserv.com |
