Doxo Inc. has taken a significant step in its mission to remove paper from the bill-paying process by securing AT&T Inc. as a biller offering doxoPAY electronic payments to its customers, the e-payments provider startup announced Nov. 3.
By adding Dallas-based AT&T, its largest customer to date, more than 100 million new bill-paying customers will have access to electronic statements and payment through the free doxo.com website, Doxo CEO Steve Shivers tells PaymentsSource.
“AT&T is mammoth in size, and with the millions of documents they process and move per month, they represent one of the biggest billers in the country,” Shivers says.
Seattle-based Doxo wants businesses to “turn off their paper” and save money on bill collections and processing, Shivers said.
But eliminating or reducing paper use does not guarantee a company will save money, Shivers contends.
When companies attempt to go paperless, they often set up automatic payment systems in which the customer still pays with a credit card. In doing so, the company may save about $10 in paper-reduction costs, but it incurs $25 in processing fees, Shivers says.
“We view billing and collection as one transaction,” Shivers says.
Shivers would not say how much Doxo charges billers, but he claims the company’s clients save at least 80% compared with their normal payment process of using paper or their own online service. Doxo does this by enabling users to set up an account that withdraws funds directly from an assigned checking account through the automated clearinghouse system instead of via a credit card or other payment method. Doxo also sends the payment directly to a biller account.
AT&T will offer its customers the option of paying through its own online service or to open a Doxo account to make all future payments, Shivers says.
In addition, those using doxoPAY on doxo.com, which features the “digital file cabinet” that stores bill statements and payment records, will have access to a new automatic pay feature unless the bills exceed a certain amount determined by the payer, according to a Doxo press release.
With the automatic pay feature, Doxo alerts the user via e-mail to his computer or a text message to his mobile phone (currently only Apple Inc. iPhones) that a bill was higher than normal or above the set limit, Shiver explains.
Doxo users set up payment credentials only once for all bill payments instead of link to various sites using different passwords and filing different credit card information, Shivers says. Users open a “to do” box to pay bills, and a “file cabinet” box to keep track of statements and payment records, he adds.
Using Doxo also eliminates the hassle of contacting various financial institutions or credit card companies to halt automatic payments when a card is lost, stolen or being used illegally, Shivers says.
When Doxo launched the electronic bill management and payment website in February, it said it signed Sprint Nextel Corp. as a billing provider in addition to financial institutions and utility companies (
Doxo should be encouraged about signing a company such as AT&T, but it has “a long road” ahead in continuing to add billers and converting consumers to electronic bill paying through doxoPAY, Gwenn Bézard, co-founder and research director at Boston-based Aite Group, tells PaymentsSource.
“There are dozens of companies trying to get electronic bill paying set up, and it took many years for some companies to try to go check-free and set up their own electronic payment options,” he says.
Doxo addresses an important issue in trying to decrease the significant amount of paper still involved in the billing statement and payment process, Bézard adds.
“There has been some success in making payments more electronic, but the bill-statement side still has a lot of paper because you still need to sign the bill in many cases,” he says.
Shivers agrees that creating a paperless payment systems will take time, but he is convinced his company is on the right path.
“We have miles to go to accomplish what we want because we have health care, financial, government and other industries we need to get involved,” Shivers says. “It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is happening at a fast clip when you realize we just started this.”
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