Innovation distinguishes a leader from a follower

Edgars Sturans, President and Chief Executive Officer of Billing Tree Inc. (BillingTree), believes that since competing on price rarely wins new customers anymore, it's up to innovation to make the difference, and that is why BillingTree develops its own software. "You have to consider what real value processors can offer," he said. "If it is just the processing itself, that is becoming a commodity; offering a broader solution is definitely a necessity."

BillingTree provides customers a holistic solution suite called myPayrazr, a flexible platform solution designed to easily accommodate customers' needs. Dave Yohe, the company's Vice President of Marketing, said, "There is a lot of value in having an integrated solutions suite designed to work together while also being flexible enough with an open API system to be able to go out and actually work with other systems as well."

Yohe added that BillingTree can accommodate a business with a significant number of custom integrations done through a specific service provider, such as an interactive voice response system provider. "If they just want to include that into our ecosystem, we can also pull that in," he said. "I think that's the real key differentiator to the myPayrazr suite."

Being prepared is half the victory

Sturans believes regulations in the payments industry will increase over time, and ISO owners who aren't prepared for this could be at risk and get left behind. "I don't see compliance and regulations slowing down in any way," he said. "There are many state laws that are coming out or that already exist, where payment processors are being held responsible for knowing their clients more and more. Those are definitely risks that are going to increase, not decrease."

To help navigate the regulatory landscape, BillingTree offers a free e-learning resource to its customers called Compliance Coach that helps customers understand the regulatory changes occurring in the payments industry.

Yohe said Compliance Coach can also be useful in fulfilling compliance requirements. "When an employee has completed the course, we can document that we gave them training," he said. "So it's got a real value to not only the education component, but the ability to be able to audit and confirm who has gone through the course work and provide proof that you have trained your employees."

Processing solutions for all

BillingTree prides itself on offering a variety of competitively priced, flexible transaction processing solutions for customers, including credit and debit card, mobile, text, automated clearing house, phone and web payments.

"I think our pricing is very competitive, probably more so than some legacy products, especially when you also count in all the feature functionalities that we are adding to the package," Sturans said. "At the same time, some legacy type systems don't update their software and aren't as flexible as our technologies."

In addition, the company also offers underwriting and full-service customer support. "Our customer service and our in-house underwriting helps guide customers through the steps of getting underwritten and obviously finding the right type of services that they need," Yohe said. "And then the post support extended once they are up and running, addressing questions about whether something posted or if there is a need to help somebody because they have double batched or something. We have a fantastic in-house support team for our customers in the U.S."

Sturans sees having an integrated all-in-one approach as the key going forward into the future for BillingTree. "We see for BillingTree that the integrations model has been working for us and it has been getting us into some other markets that we are jumping into," he said. "We think that a consultative, multichannel approach and having the consolidated data across all platforms is something that is going to take us into the future."

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