Pitney Bowes Inc. aired plans to make a sizeable investment this year in its new Volly online billing system, which is designed to give consumers a single online portal to pay bills, and view coupons and other marketing materials.
Stamford-based Pitney Bowes has a large technology development center in Shelton, as well as a significant software development center in upstate New York.
While startups Doxo and Zumbox are already operating rival digital mail sites, with Doxo having signed up major consumer brands like Sprint, neither brings the marketing clout that can be wielded by Pitney Bowes.
Pitney Bowes flexed its legal muscle against Zumbox in 2009, suing the company in October that year for patent infringement. In May, a federal judge in California granted Zumbox a legal stay from Pitney Bowes”™ lawsuit to allow the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office more time to review the applicability of the patents in question, and Zumbox continues to market its service.
Pitney Bowes wasted no time in moving ahead as well, and in a conference call with investment analysts CEO Murray Martin spent significant time detailing the new Volly service, which will be made available to consumers later this year for free. The company is spending the first half of the year enlisting other corporations to make their billing information available using Volly, with Pitney Bowes choosing the name to represent the back and forth “volleys” between consumers and the companies from which they buy products and services.
Companies will have to pay to use the service, with Pitney Bowes not immediately disclosing the revenue model; it maintains companies will ultimately save money using Volly due to reduced print and mailing costs for billing and other consumer services.
“We are already involved with over 70 percent of the transaction billers in the marketplace, and those billers have both digital and physical delivery,” Martin said. “The digital delivery is in the 10 percent to 12 percent (range) of all transaction mail. What that does is provide opportunity as billers look to have a different cost alternative, and our business model will be such that it will be lower cost than physical (mail).”
Pitney Bowes also plans to reach out to independent application developers to solicit additional content for using the service, and possibly other partners.
In the meantime, Pitney Bowes continues to confront reluctance by small businesses to spend money on more traditional products like postal meters and services. In the fourth quarter, Pitney Bowes”™ revenue was $1.4 billion, down 1.3 percent from a year earlier. For all of 2010, Pitney Bowes earned $292 million on $5.4 billion in revenue, off 31 percent and 3 percent respectively. Still, since August Pitney Bowes stock is up from under $20 a share to more than $26 ”“ trailing the pace of the overall S&P 500, but growth nevertheless.
