Automating the invoice-to-payment process
What happens when a resourceful payments entrepreneur identifies a client-side operations gap that can be automated to save clients time and money? For Thomas Aronica, founder of Skybank Financial and Biller Genie, the answer was easy: create a technology enterprise to architect the solution.
Aronica launched Biller Genie in August 2018, headquartering the company in Miami. His ambition was to design a technology solution that streamlined the business invoicing and follow-up process, seamlessly moving payments through the entire accounts receivable process, and ultimately delivering the right data to all the right places. The firm has a team of twenty, and Aronica predicts the group will double in size in 2020. According to a company statement, the Biller Genie platform "eliminates costly human errors while empowering companies to effectively manage cash flow."
In the spirit of delivering on its promise, Biller Genie is well on its way to proving its worth. This year, Biller Genie has been recognized as an early-stage innovator multiple times. For example, the company was honored in both the CPA Practice Advisor Technology Innovation awards and in Nacha – The Electronic Payments Association NexTen awards. In addition, Biller Genie was recently accepted into the Money20/20 Startup Academy.
Building the bridge
According to Aronica, who serves as the company's chief executive officer, Biller Genie is "a gateway on steroids, and at the end of the day, we're that link between the financial network and the merchant's accounting software." Aronica characterized Biller Genie's greatest values as "acceleration of cash flow and shortening the invoice-to-cash cycle, eliminating or significantly reducing administrative work, and improving the customer experience." He also indicated his team took several months to build and beta test the new Biller Genie platform before stepping out with its formal launch in early 2019.
"We wanted to make sure the system was functioning exactly the way we expected it to," Aronica stated. "We only released it to a small section of the community so we could do quality assurance testing before our full-scale launch." Aronica said phase one of that launch was all about "building a direct sales channel," which included "establishing an online presence in app stores, building the brand and driving traffic online."
Unique payments proposition
Additional market needs have also presented themselves to Aronica. "It became apparent the payments community really needed a solution and could use Biller Genie like a tool in their tool belt to market to their customers," he said. "It allows them to have a more sophisticated payments conversation, translating into higher volumes at higher margins.
He further characterized Biller Genie as "so much more than a QuickBooks plugin." He added that the firm backs this claim with integrations and an ambition to become fully agnostic. "We have five different software integrations already and expect to have 25 in place by the end of first quarter 2020," he said. "Our connection is seamless, we're not limited by a single architecture, and we do all the workflow on our side, then just push the information back into the business software."
In addition to expanding the number of software applications Biller Genie is linked with, Aronica anticipates the coming year will bring additional automation. "Today, we can automate email and paper, and we're adding text messaging as well as an electronic data interchange feature into next year," he said. "We also plan to add peer-to-peer and cash payment solutions, as well as foreign currency conversion."
Aronica believes Biller Genie is well-positioned to keep innovating, limited only by the company's own creativity. 
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