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Bill Identity (ASX:BID): A leading global provider of utility bill management technology
Trusted by businesses around the world, Bill Identity’s cloud-based technology leverages Robotic Process Automation, removing the need for human intervention and giving organisations control over their energy spend.
Founded in 2012 and listed on the ASX (ASX:BID), Bill Identity operates across Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. The company’s innovative technology serves its clients by improving data visibility, integrity and control. Managing Director Guy Maine has 20 years’ experience in senior executive roles across major Australian companies, and talks to us about the benefits of using Robotic Process Automation, the acquisitions that have helped the company grow, and plans to continue its growth by playing a role in the global automation of utility bills.
The fourth revolution
“The way I explain who we are and what we do is to bring this back to [the consumer],” Mr Maine says. “You would receive an electricity bill for your household, and when that bill arrives you would probably look at the cost, but you then probably don’t do much about that bill until you actually put it in your diary to pay it.”
Bill Identity (ASX:BID) deals with an expanded version of this process, relating to large multi-site enterprises that would expect to receive thousands or tens of thousands of bills that need to be paid every month.
“They wouldn’t have dissimilar practices to [the consumer]. They would receive those bills; they would enter those into their Accounts Payable system. They may check a few of them, make sure that the rate’s right potentially, and then approve them for payment.”
Bill Identity’s job is to manage electricity, gas, water and other commodities for these businesses. It runs the bills through a robotic workforce, digitising the data and exploring every item to make sure it’s correct, following up on any exceptions on the clients’ behalf and even paying bills for some clients.
“RPA, or Robotic Process Automation, is being talked about as the Fourth [Industrial] Revolution. RPA simply takes processes that have previously been done manually, and utilises a robotic workforce to do that same process. We’re talking about code and algorithms being built for us in the Amazon Cloud.”
For example, a certain robotic worker for Bill Identity would be programmed specifically to read every item on a particular bill, told where to find them in order for it to be digitised and put onto the company’s platform for other robotic workers to validate.
“It’s doing something through automation that previously you probably would have got on an Excel spread sheet, or you would have had someone manually entering that data into it’s own Accounts Payable system. So that’s what Robotic Process Automation is.”
The company is unique in the world for utilising RPA in the niche of utility bills; no competitor in the sector is using robotic workers as a complete end-to-end process to collect, digitise, analyse, validate and pay a bill as Bill Identity does.
“We launched this business in Australia over 5 years ago, and we’ve been prosecuting our strategy here in Australia since then. We have since progressed, and our geographies are under management, so we’ve now been operating in the UK for around 18 months, and more recently in the USA.”
The company sees that it has a role to play in the global automation of the utility bills niche, using its propriety tech to help businesses across the world manage their bill stream more effectively and with deeper and richer data than they have before.
Though keen to grow organically, Bill Identity also recognises the strength of growing through acquisition. This was evidenced in 2020, when it acquired a UK-based management software business call Optima Energy Management.
“What we saw in Optima was a proprietary software platform, the owner had been managing that business for 30 years, built a good reputation up. His software purely managed validation of bills, and it was very good at doing its job, but it didn’t do the remainder of what we do: the collection of bills utilising robotic workers.”
The company recognised Optima’s existing software as something it could replace and upgrade, as well as benefitting from Optima’s expertise and market credibility, which bought with it a number of long-serving, important clients.
“For us, it was an acquisition that gave us scale and market share in a market that we certainly want to grow into and had already started that process. It was an opportunistic acquisition; it had a great database of clients; it was well-considered software; and simply we want to take those clients to the next level in terms of RPA and our platform.”
When it comes to a tree of development that will further the technologies that Bill Identity deals with, RPA is the beginning of a journey that will move through machine learning on a pathway towards the ultimate goal of Artificial Intelligence.
“You have desktop RPA – which is utilising robotic workers to do simple tasks. Our RPA is more cognitive. We can have robotic workers that determine whether a bill is accurate or not without our intervention. With machine learning you go to the next step. There is an allowance in the code of robotic workers that they can start to see patterns in data.”
As the company signs more and more clients, machine learning would allow it to gain an understanding and analysis of trends, with robotic workers being able to interact with the data in more complex ways.
“You might have one particular main street, where a number of our clients operate from, and our robotic workers will be able to pick up where one particular side is utilising more energy than another in a similar environment. That’s where machine learning can start to help, and it can be utilised to be a benefit to individual clients.”
Progressing down the pathway through machine learning will help the company do more analytics around consumption, goals and net zero targeting, amongst other things, purely based on the robotic workers’ findings.
“We’re a relatively young company,” Mr Maine concludes, “with proprietary Australian technology. We are unique in the world in terms of utilising a robotic platform in the cloud for utility bills. We now operate in over 40 countries. We are expanding globally. Our customer base spend is in excess of $5.8bn in utility spend per annum. We’re very keen on propagating our story in the US specifically this year, and investing behind that opportunity.”
With its Robotic Process Automation technology offering global businesses a service unlike any other in the world, and a pathway towards even greater technologies, Bill Identity (ASX:BID) is forging a path through the fourth industrial revolution. Find out more about Bill Identity by visiting billidentity.com.
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