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November 8, 1999

FutureWeb:
Billserv.com Helps Pay The Bills

At A Glance:

Billserv.com
City: San Antonio
Key management and founders: Michael Long, chairman and CEO; Louis Hoch, president and chief operating officer; David Jones, senior VP
Year founded: July 1998
Employees: 40
Amount of venture funding to date: Approximately $15.3 million
Business: Electronic bill presentment and payment service bureau
hree years ago, 24-year-old David Jones spent $65 on a charity raffle so he could dine with--and pitch a business plan to--his boss, CEO Parris Holmes Jr. of Billing Concepts, a third-party provider of billing clearinghouse and information services to the telecommunications industry.

It was money well-spent. Today, Jones is sitting on top of a startup with millions in its coffers and an opportunity to become the billing clearinghouse on the Internet. The lunch marked the beginning of Billserv.com Inc., which Jones founded last year with two other former Billing Concepts employees, Michael Long and Louis Hoch.

Billserv.com is an electronic service bureau used to present and pay all sorts of bills online. There is growing interest in that capability, especially among Billserv.com's target market: midsize companies seeking to outsource their online billing operations. Market research firm Killen & Associates estimates the online-billing market will grow from about $4 billion in 2000 to $19 billion in 2005.

Billserv.com has already signed 10 customers, including Central Hudson Gas & Electric, Homes & Shaw, Sallie Mae, Ultramar Diamond Shamrock, and San Antonio Water System. It has formal relationships with Bank of America, Blue Gill Software, CheckFree, and CyberCash. Jones says acting as the middleman will make it easier for small and midsize companies to offer their customers online billing. Going through an intermediary service such as Billserv.com lets billers pay per transaction, rather than building legacy-to-Web connections to companies such as CheckFree.

"We want to be the company that takes the bill from the biller and gets it to the mailbox by sending the bills to TransPoint, Bank of America, or CheckFree," Jones says. "All they have to do is have one relationship with Billserv."

continue on to some follow-up profiles