Shareholders update from website
billserv.com
Chairman and CEO Message to the Shareholders of billserv.com
April 19, 1999
Dear Shareholders and other interested parties:
On behalf of billserv.com, it is with great pleasure that I report the progress of our company to date.
billserv.com continues to make strong progress in large part due to your support and confidence in our plans and our future. We are dedicated to growing our business over the long term, and building it in such a way as to provide value, strength and stability to our shareholders. We plan to do this by attracting high-quality, talented personnel, building high-quality and value driven relationships with our customers, and delivering innovative service and solutions that are second to none.
Personnel
I am sure you have read in a recent press release that we hired Tony Sidiropoulos as a Director of Marketing. Tony brings a very strong set of credentials to billserv.com. Tony was one of the first in North America to provide marketing and management leadership in a successful deployment of an EBPP project at one of the premier utility companies in the United States. As an industry leader, Tony, alongside David Jones, our Sr. VP of Strategic Planning and Marketing, will be able to create successful marketing strategies for billserv.com.
Our staffing continues to grow. Currently, we have 15 employees. Our goal is to build and deploy our sales force into major metropolitan areas where we can target regional billers who will benefit most from our EBPP service bureau model. Our focus is to hire the best talent available with skills in relationship and business development that will lead to the long-term contracts that are value driven.
Partners:
As you know, we have established our contractual relationship with CheckFree Corp., currently the largest electronic bill presentment consolidator in the industry. We are also continuing to develop strategic and essential relationships with a number of other industry leaders in presentment and payment processing. In addition we are working with the cutting edge companies that will provide innovative services that will be advantageous to billers and consumers alike. These relationships, once fully developed and announced, will clearly demonstrate the value billserv.com brings to the market.
Customers
We have two companies today in pilot programs with us. Earlier this month, we announced that San Antonio Water System (SAWS) has initiated an EBPP pilot program with some of its employees. SAWS currently sends out more than 250,000 bills per month. The other, while not announced, is a paging provider in the Dallas area. This company will provide us access to billers in the wireless industry that have subscriber
bases totaling more than 2,000,000.
We have had very positive discussions with many companies in our current sales pipeline, and that number continues to grow weekly. These prospects clearly understand the value and differentiating advantages that we bring to them: ease of system integration, strong industry-wide relationships that provide broad access to bill presentment sites for their customers convenience, and the strength of directed marketing and tailored product offerings to their consumer through the electronic bill.
bills.com
billserv.com this week announced that it has created bills.com ( www.bills.com ) the first national Internet portal for bill presentment and payment. By making this bold move, billserv.com continues to take a leadership role in promoting the EBPP industry and
moving it forward. "Eighty percent of online consumers would rather visit a single web site than multiple biller-specific Web sites to pay bills electronically," said Paul Hughes, a senior analyst with the Yankee Group. "bills.com provides the central site that these
consumers are currently looking for, and demonstrates the convenience and ease of use that will be critical to future consumer acceptance, adoption, and growth of electronic bill presentment and payment services."
"While the Internet billing sector is still in the early stages of development, billserv.com is clearly taking the lead with its new bills.com portal," said Robert Tango, vice president of equity research for Tucker Anthony. "The new portal will provide the company and its services with greater exposure."
Since bills.com will maintain consumers' bill paying information, bills.com will enable consumers to make online purchases without giving their credit card information on the Internet and make their purchases through debits to their checking account.
Media Coverage
Our public relations program is in full swing, and I hope that you've been seeing some of the results. We conducted an aggressive east and west coast media/industry analyst tour in late March, which has resulted in coverage in InformationWeek , c|net's news.com ,
Red Herring , USA Today , Inter@ctiveWeek , the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition and the Online Reporter, with more to come. The EBPP market is getting more attention, and our ongoing media outreach is putting billserv.com at the forefront of the industry buzz.
NASDAQ Filing
We expect to file a registration statement with the SEC and file for NASDAQ Small Cap listing within the next 30 days. Through these actions, we will attain reporting status and reach a level of visibility that only NASDAQ can provide. |
