Dublin, Ireland: 2 Feburary 2012. Brite:Bill, a leading customer communications platform, today announced it will be exhibiting in this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from 27 February to 1 March.

Mobile World Congress 2012 will celebrate the current state of mobile and offer a glimpse into where mobile has the potential to go next.  There were over 60,000 attendees at last year’s event with almost 1,400 exhibitors.

Brite:Bill will be participating on the Ireland pavilion in Hall 1, stand no 1F17.

Brite:Bill’s electronic bill and payment presentment (EBPP) platform provides an entirely new customer experience without changing core legacy.  The technology greatly reduces the time it takes to implement an EBPP solution.  It combines separate bills into a single view for the customer and CSR teams and provides analysis across all products, even if the data comes from different systems.

The platform helps telecom companies improve some of the most important industry KPIs: 

• Net Promoter scores
• Average cost to serve
• ARPU growth
• Churn

It is successfully deployed by banks, telecom/utility companies, postal operators in Europe and Asia.

About Brite:Bill
Founded in Dublin, Ireland in 2010, Brite:Bill provides the world’s leading customer communications platform. The company solutions improve the communication and delivery options between businesses and consumers in telecom and utility companies, banks and postal operators. www.britebill.com

12 January 2012

Young Dublin start-up Brite:bill took a strategic change of direction and its technology is now being piloted by two of the world’s largest post offices.

There’s a term in the start-up world that became quite fashionable in the last year or two. That word is ‘pivot’ and is usually applied when a technology company realises it needs to change direction or focus in order to secure a more viable or relevant future.

In the case of Dublin tech company Brite:bill, the opportunity arose to switch from being a business-to-consumer (B2C) outfit to become a firm that would instead work with other businesses to serve consumers better.

The work of Brite:bill

Brite:bill was previously known as Getitkeepit and via the internet helped consumers to take charge of their billing paper trail and instead manage and pay bills via an internet portal. It worked successfully with banks and service providers like telcos to streamline how people paid bills.

Accenture Ireland managing director Mark Ryan and Brite:bill co-founder and CEO Alan Coleman

However, company co-founder and CEO Alan Coleman realised there was a bigger opportunity, a global opportunity in fact, to help post offices around the world stem major losses due to declining postal volumes in a world gone digital.

A successful fundraising in 2010 was the opportunity to change focus.

Using Brite:bill’s technology, direct billers such as telcos and utility companies can provide a suite of online analysis tools that incentivise customers, both consumer and corporate, to adopt electronic billing and payment, reducing costs while also offering the potential to grow revenues through their online channels.

Read more on Silicon Republic 

brite:bill, a digital post innovator, has been awarded the Tenego sponsored ISA Collaboration Award at the annual Irish Software Awards evening. The young company has already been posting $1 million in revenues and this award adds to their impressive start as a business.

The award comes after brite:bill created a new partnership with the world’s largest consulting firm Accenture. brite:bill beat off competition after demonstrating an “outstanding example of how two organisations can collaborate to open new international markets and grow revenues into a global industry vertical.”

Donagh Kiernan, CEO of Tenego sponsors of the award praised the young firm for their new partnership and declared them worthy winners of the accolade. “Already, as a result of the partnership between brite:bill and Accenture, $1m revenues has already been secured by the company and a very robust pipeline of opportunities created with help of the partner team of 25 consultants dedicated to driving and supporting the relationship. This is quality and effective partnering,” he said.

Six other companies won awards at the evening at the Burlinton Hotel. The awards, also sponsored by Enterprise William Fry and IBM recognise the outstanding contribution that the software industry makes to Ireland’s economy.

Article from Inside Ireland

The recent announcement from Adobe to stop developing Flash for mobile devices is the final nail in the coffin for this technology

Flash has had a long and contentious history, especially on mobile devices where its performance has been dismal. With common consensus that “mobile” is the future, it was inevitable that Adobe would eventually make this decision. But this decision will cause fundamental changes in the tools used for presenting information on websites.

…this change will have a huge knock-on effect in online bill presentation.

Flash animation can no longer be used as the main presentation tool, and websites will now have to standardise on new toolsets when presenting rich interactive content on the web. This standardisation means that websites which previously used legacy Flash-based presentation tools will now have to move to HTML5. This is significant for telcos, utility companies and financial institutions, for whom this change will have a huge knock-on effect in online bill presentation.

Within the bill presentation space, online has been treated as a second-class citizen, an afterthought of an internal IT system provided by vendors who don’t appreciate the new opportunities offered by the web. This has become even more evident within the tablet and mobile devices. These vendors have simply thrown together some basic Flash-based tools to display the customer bill and possibly some basic summary information.

Brite:Bill believe that the customer experience should be the most important aspect of a company’s website. From the very start we have provided innovative UI tools to present bills, documents and customer-specific analytics using the best possible technologies available to the platform that the customer is using. Because Brite:Bill believe in the experience first, it was vital that Brite:Bill develop tools which would work seamlessly across all devices. Therefore a decision was made early in the company’s history to support HTML5 as well as Flash.

… it was vital that Brite:Bill develop tools which would work seamlessly across all devices.

Our product mission of “seamlessly delivering the best possible experience” is achieved by Brite:Bill’s intelligent detection of device capabilities and its abstraction of Flash and HTML5 widgets. While we have been building impressive interactive widgets for our customers, the architecture still allows for isolation of these widgets within the overall experience so that an intelligent decision can be made as to whether a Flash or HTML5 version needs to be displayed. This means that Brite:Bill’s existing customers are completely insulated from the fundamental shift in the industry and can seamlessly create either the same experience on all devices – or tailor the experience for individual devices – without having to wrestle with the technicalities of each platform’s support for rendering technologies.

As the world starts to embrace HTML5 across all web channels (full web, tablet and mobile) Brite:Bill is already in position, having spent the past few years tuning and tweaking support for HTML5 to get the best possible experience in the most compatible and device-independent manner while still maintaining support for “legacy” Flash on older browsers.

We welcome this move by Adobe as it makes the future a much simpler and cleaner experience, both for the consumer and for the companies deploying interactive electronic bill presentation services.

There is one future for the web and it is HTML5. Long live HTML5.

The post has always been known for the reliable, guaranteed and secure delivery of the mail. Terms such as “the cheque is in the post” would not have developed had it not been for the fact that the post was always the mechanism used to deliver important correspondence, correspondence you rely on to be delivered. Today, 1st-class mail such as utility bills, government documents like tax returns, bank statements, cheques, pay slips and employment contracts are still being distributed via mail as it is still relied upon both by the sender of the item and by the receiver as the premium delivery mechanism for such items. While e-mail and couponing platforms like Groupon have replaced much of the “junk-mail” noise, posts worldwide are in the enviable position of being known as the trustworthy, reliable mechanism of delivery of vital correspondence.

This “trusted” brand is vital as posts worldwide move into a hybrid world of physical and digital delivery. Utility companies, government agencies and financial institutions are all moving to provide their correspondence digitally, but end users are reticent about turning off physical delivery. They like the idea of having a copy of the document independent of the source of the document.

Having a securely stored copy from the time of issue completely independent of the issuer is the first killer feature of post as they move into the digital delivery (and storage) phase. The second killer feature is the ability to have all correspondence in a single place – a virtual filing cabinet (I will expand upon this feature in a future post). The purpose of this post is to discuss secure digital delivery and what it means to digital mail going forward.

There are numerous digital delivery mechanisms today. The most obvious is e-mail, but instant messaging, social networking and SMS are examples of other message delivery platforms. The key difference between these delivery mechanisms and digital postal delivery is trust. These mechanisms are good for notifications and for more frivolous communications – but would you trust any of these with delivery of a cheque, a bill or a bank statement?

In the majority of cases, the answer would be: no. You might trust one of these mechanisms with notification of the availability of one of those items – but not with the actual delivery. The key distinction between digital post and other forms of digital delivery is this: digital post supports secure delivery of correspondence between senders and recipients.

The brite:bill platform has been designed from the ground-up with security in mind. Borrowing security technology from platforms designed for the financial industry married with secure notification technology designed for the telecoms industry. It provides a secure repository where “senders”, mail service providers (MSPs), utility companies, banks and government departments can securely deliver correspondence, and where recipients can securely access it, fill it and analyse it independent of the sender, and for as long as the recipient requires. This becomes a virtual filing cabinet provided by posts for viewing important documentation.

brite:bill supports secure delivery on a number of levels:

Transport

• All communication both from the senders and recipients requires at least 128-bit SSL/TLS connections
• Where a directory-based push integration is utilised, a VPN and a secure file delivery protocol like SFTP is utilised.

Access

• Senders are further required to have the appropriate certificate and present the appropriate credentials before connection to the “sender’s” interfaces of the platform.
• Recipients are typically verified via physical delivery as part of an enhanced registration process.
• Recipients are also required to enter secure identifications such as username/password. This support can, if required, be extended to secure keyfob access for extra security and authentication.

Document level
As well as supporting secure document encoding protocols like PDF/A, the platform can further secure documents via “shared secrets”, where users can be prompted for information contained within the document – and within their own profile – before being granted access to open a document.

Storage
As well as protecting the platform from external access, a significant aspect of the security of the platform is to protect the data against “internal” un-authorised access. The data storage within the platform encrypts all documentation and key fields such as passwords, payment identifiers and identity information. This encryption supports hardware secure modules and advanced security techniques throughout the whole platform, for example, no unencrypted data is ever stored in a session or written to log files and, where decrypted data is accessed temporarily, the memory associated with this data is immediately wiped.

Notifications
A key aspect of the platform is seamless notifications of the delivery of new digital mail. Where possible only secure notifications channels are utilised, but for convenience end-users will demand use of insecure channels such as e-mail. The platform has been designed to accommodate these channels by an innovative approach of dual-channel identity verifications. For example, an e-mail address itself is not enough to securely identify a user, the receipt of a digital and separately verifiable document which includes this e-mail address will increase the trust associated with this email address. This topic will be covered in full in a future blog post.

Trusted delivery is the key asset of posts worldwide and as we embrace a new digital future, this trust must be maintained by using only a fully secured digital mail delivery platform. brite:bill supports levels of security which are significantly higher than those achievable via other notifications platforms and bespoke websites. This provides a strong basis for a post to carry on that trusted relationship with senders and recipients well into the future.

For more information on the brite:bill platform, you can contact me at: jerome.oflaherty@britebill.com or sales@britebill.com.

Recent studies on the Postal industry have been unanimous that transactional mail volume (bills, statements, correspondance) are declining exponentially. Accenture’s High Performance Post Study forecasts that there will be a global average of 44% decline in mail volumes by 2020, and the Boston Consulting Group in their study “Projecting U.S. Mail Volumes to 2020,” forecast a -1.5% CAGR every year from 2010 to 2020.

The question of whether this decline is a temporary phenomenon is convincingly refuted by the Accenture study illustrating here the traditional patterns of mail volumes against the cycles of GDP growth.

While these studies are stark a more dramatic view of this decline emerges when combining the factors of digital communications channels today would indicate the decline is not linear.

- Growth in Broadband Penetration : OECD studies show that the rate of broadband penetration is growing at a CAGR of 21%.

- Proliferation of Online Devices : Connected Mobile devices will be the #1 method of access to the internet.

- Social Networking : Social Networking is now the #1 online activity. It represents 13% of all time spent online. It did not exist 5 years ago!

Accenture’s High Performance Post Study forecasts that there will be a global average of 44% decline in mail volumes by 2020

Another emerging trend is postal volumes do not recover from postal disruption. The rate of substitution of digital for physical mail accelerates where mail deliveries are disrupted by weather, acts of God or industrial action. For instance in Canada large numbers of households have switched to online billing due to the current ongoing postal industrial action disrupting postal delivery. This move and the customer numbers are significant and permanent, once they switch to online they do not return.

Re-imagine and re-define

The challenge to Posts now is re-imagine and re-define the postal business in this new era. Posts will have to be very different organisations in the future. There will always be a requirement for physical mail delivery, most people still like getting actual mail especially personal mail ( greeting cards, letters, parcels, etc;) but having a diverse portfolio of digital services will be crucial for Posts to maintain their relevancy as the trusted custodian and courier of our correspondence.

Investment in Digital Mail is the start of this journey and Posts have unique capabilities and combined with their established brand perception positions them to be a very credible and relevant competitor for the digital players populating this digital space like Facebook, Google, Groupon, Zumbox, Doxo, Manilla for example.

Trusted brand: Posts brands consistently rank very high in studies examining the worlds most trusted brands.

Significant Revenue Streams : Posts may not be making profits these days but they still have the capacity to generate very large amounts of cash.

Unparalleled logistics infrastructure : Posts are ubiquitous. Every street in every town sees an arm of the postal service every day. This could be leveraged to combine the best of physical and digital.

Identity : Posts know where we live. We trust them. Why shouldn’t they similarly be the custodians of our online identity ?

Digital Geography : Posts know our addresses and there for could target digital messages and mail to geographic areas. This is a very powerful capability and something not readily available to other online players.

You gotta make decisions. You gotta keep making decisions, even if they’re wrong decisions, you know. If you don’t make decisions, you’re stuffed

You gotta make decisions

This all brings to mind a quote from a favorite films which nicely illustrates the dilemma faced by Posts. Touching the Void is a story about two climbers and how they overcame the adversity of a mountaineering accident. At one point one of the climbers is faced with a life or death choice. Alone, perched on an ice ledge, inside a ravine, with a broken leg and no way of climbing out he is facing throwing himself into the blackness below in the hope that some unforeseen outcome might improve his situation, he says “You gotta make decisions. You gotta keep making decisions, even if they’re wrong decisions, you know. If you don’t make decisions, you’re stuffed.” Posts maybe be not in such a risky situation but the natural reaction to possible peril or fundamental change to do nothing whilst hoping that it will all pass is not an option, Posts must start their digital strategies now and give themselves time to learn and refine.

P.S: Without wishing to ruin the film…it all worked out well in the end !

“Why would I need that? I have email.”

Indeed, at first glance, an email solution would seem to be identical to digital mail: both platforms offer a way to send information in an electronic form; they allow the receipt and retention of the data. Therefore email, given how widely used it is, makes the development of another electronic delivery platform unnecessary. Right?

Wrong.

To consider why a digital mail solution has distinct advantages over email let’s consider our email inbox for a second. Back in “days of yore” when we all started using email, we received everything there. We received all our social correspondence from friends, we received work stuff, business networking opportunities, bills, statements, product-and-services marketing, receipts from items we bought online, eTickets for flights and concerts… all topped off with a increasingly healthy dollop of spam mail! Roll the clock forward to the modern day and there has been a clearout. All our socialising happens in our social networks, business networking has its own platform, work email and collaboration has emerged to take that from our personal email… So what’s left? Marketing, receipts, offers, statements, spam, eTickets, bills, to name but a few.

What is missing is an environment to focus on the receipt and management of the important mail… or digital mail. What digital mail offers is a way to manage who is allowed to send you information… therefore no more spam. It also goes beyond the act of delivery and receipt. In a brite:bill digital mail box when you receive a bill or statement the mailbox continues to help you manage the document by automatically filing it, analysing and charting any relevant data such as a bill amount. It places important dates in a calendar and it sets up notifications and reminders–all of which happens without the intervention of the user.

It is highly secure and provides an auditable trail for the sender so that they can be sure that their important mail has been received and understood. This is a particular advantage over email because when you are sending someone a bill you need to be sure that they have received it and read it. With email you don’t have the same level of traceability or security, which means it could effect the reliability of collections or other actions the sender is expecting.

An important point to note here is that all digital mail is not the same. It needs to go beyond just showing you an electronic copy of the physical mail. Digital mail should work at the data level to enhance and add value for the recipient and sender alike.

Digital mail goes way beyond email. It provides services that help both the recipient manage, retain and understand what has been sent and it gives the mailer a secure, reliable, actionable environment where they can be confident that their mail is delivered with due care and attention.

What this means for posts who implement digital mail will be the subject of my next post.

This is exactly the trend we have seen occurring in the area of customer billing. While most providers are constantly working on improving their Quality of Service (QoS) and expanding their service offerings they are only now looking at ways to engage their customers by using the bill to drive increased personalisation. They are recognising that the bill provides a perfect opportunity to speak to their customers on an individual level and deliver targeted messages that improve cross-selling and levels of self-care.

brite:bill’s EBPP platform is helping CSPs to overcome the challenges of legacy billing engines and redefine the role their bills play in building their relationship with their customers.

The Guardian, London, UK, December 16th 2010

Anyone who has made any attempt to manage their bills and online accounts in one place will know how hard that is, and how many clicks it takes deep inside a site to access all the information you need – let alone pulling that out to try and centralise your finances.

brite:bill, which launched in January this year, is the perfect example of clean and efficient technology disrupting a outdated market. It’s trying to address that problem for consumers, and it’s tackling the problem from the inside out by striking deals with utilities and telecoms firms as well as banks.

The whole thing is about user experience. Firms have traditionally been constrained by their billing engines, but we try to create a more interactive and dynamic experience

The back end of most traditional billing systems are based on old and very cumbersome enterprise software that delivers itemised bills often in PDF form, or similarly closed and incompatible systems. brite:bill initially began by focusing on tools for consumers, not unlike Mint.com, that would let users pull in data from their electricity, gas, phone and bank accounts to manage them more efficiently.

As they developed the business they realised the best way to make money from their technology would instead be to white label that to companies themselves. Announcing series a funding of €1.2 today, chief executive Alan Coleman said the plans were to expand from eight staff in Ireland and five developers in Shanghai today to as many as 25 staff within 12 months. Marketing and expansion in the UK and Europe will be key, and brite:bill is already making in-roads in the US.

“The whole thing is about user experience. Firms have traditionally been constrained by their billing engines, but we try to create a more interactive and dynamic experience,” said Coleman. “We felt the best way to monetise the technology was to provide that technology to brands, rather than be a consumer brand ourselves.”

The €1.2m investment was made by the Ulster Bank Diageo Venture Fund, managed by NCB. Seed funding of €400k came from Enterprise Ireland, as well as family and friends. This time next year Coleman said brite:bill is aiming for seven-figure revenues. The competition is two part: account management systems like Mint.com, and on the enterprise side stalwarts like Pitney Bowes and Oracle.

Handing over your online finances might seem risky, but Mint et al have been building a solid userbase for at least three years now – very aware that their businesses are defined by the strength of their security. brite:bill’s approach is less high profile, licensing their technology behind the scenes. But chances are, with growth this fast, these tools will be behind your online balance some time soon.

The Irish Times – Friday, December 17, 2010

DUBLIN-BASED software firm BriteBill has raised €1.2 million in funding. The financing from the Ulster Bank Diageo Venture Fund, which is managed by NCB Ventures, will go towards helping BriteBill expand its business in Britain and Europe next year.

BriteBill is building a global company that is “revolutionising” interactive billingAlan Coleman, CEO brite:bill

The company offers technology for interactive paperless billing, which can be customised for the delivery, personalisation and payment of bills, invoices and statements over the internet.

Chief executive Alan Coleman said BriteBill was building a global company that was “revolutionising” interactive billing.

“[The funding] is reflective of the ambition of the company,” he said.

BriteBill has moved quickly. Set up in January 2010, it focused initially on a consumer offering, GetItKeepIt.com,that would allow customers to aggregate bills in one location and manage their finances more easily.

The company spotted more opportunities, however, and began to focus more on its BriteBill solution. “

It’s been a very quick year in terms of the company’s evolution,” Mr Coleman said.

The firm raised seed funding of €400,000 from Enterprise Ireland and angel investors in May.

BriteBill’s clients include mobile operator 3 Ireland, and Mr Coleman said there are more deals in the pipeline, including one major contract it is pursuing in Ireland and deals in Britain, where it also has an office.

The company is also chasing deals across Europe, Mr Coleman said there has been interest from potential clients in Germany and Austria, with BriteBill eyeing Spain as a possible market for its services. The US also presents a possible market for BriteBill, he said.

“We’ve seen demand for what we’re doing in lots of different markets,” said Mr Coleman. “It’s very encouraging.”

Partner in NCB Ventures Will Prendergast said poor software and design had previously held back adoption of electronic billing.

“Service providers are encouraging customers to move towards electronic bill presentment and payment, as it enables them to realise significant cost savings,” he said.

“BriteBill has created a solution to this by developing user-friendly software that delivers a fully interactive, online service for customers to pay their bills.”

Mr Coleman said the company also intends to expand its Irish workforce, growing from its current eight to about 20 by the end of the year.