Avolent Unveils Voice Bill Presentment and Payment -- VBPP -- First Voice Interface for Internet Billing.Business Editors/High-Tech Writers SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 7, 2000 -- Completes Universal Reach of Electronic Bills and Provides Single Customer Experience Across All Delivery Channels -- Avolent, Inc. (formerly Just in Time Solutions, Inc.), the leading vendor of Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment See EBPP. (EBPP (Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment) Sending invoices to customers over the Internet. When payment is due, an e-mail is sent with a link to a Web page that contains the billing information and the payment services that are supported. ), Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP EIPP Electronic Invoice Payment and Presentment EIPP Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment ) and Interactive Customer Care (ICC ICC See: International Chamber of Commerce ) solutions, today introduced the first ever voice-enabled interface, based on the VoiceXML standard, for accessing interactive electronic bills and customer care through any telephone system. With this announcement, Avolent has defined a new segment within the Internet billing market; voice bill presentment and payment See EBPP. , or VBPP. This continues Avolent's strategy for enabling billers and bill publishers to deliver truly universal reach, a single consistent customer experience across all e-bill delivery channels, and a powerful mechanism to accelerate consumer adoption of e-billing. Avolent's VBPP-enabled BillCast(TM) extends consumer familiarity with traditional touch-tone and Interactive Voice Response (IVR (Interactive Voice Response) An automated telephone information system that speaks to the caller with a combination of fixed voice menus and data extracted from databases in real time. ) solutions by allowing both touch-tone and voice commands to be used for Internet billing. In addition, billers will be able to reduce their overall system costs by integrating the delivery and maintenance of all e-bill channels through a single billing and customer care system. Because Avolent's VBPP combines the familiarity of the phone with the richness and simplicity of the Web, billers can offer comprehensive customer self-service to all their customers while dramatically saving on deployment, call center, and maintenance costs. "Avolent is now the only EBPP vendor capable of providing a single end-user experience for accessing any bill transaction across all delivery channels, including the web, email, call centers, Wireless Access Protocol (WAP (1) (Wireless Access Point) See access point. (2) (Wireless Application Protocol) A standard for providing cellular phones, pagers and other handheld devices with secure access to e-mail and text-based Web pages. )-enabled devices, personal digital assistants and now, the telephone," said Brad Benson Brad William Benson (born November 25, 1955 in Altoona, Pennsylvania) is a former professional American football player. He was an offensive lineman with the New York Giants of the National Football League from 1978 to 1988. , vice president of research and development for Avolent. "By pioneering VBPP capabilities, we have completed our strategy of offering universal access for virtually all consumers to receive and review bills, make payments, and manage their accounts. The flexibility of BillCast enables us to extend the reach of electronic bills to the widest possible population and provide a unique bill management and customer care solution for all electronic billing Electronic billing is the electronic delivery and presentation of financial statements, bills, invoices, and related information sent by a company to its customers. Electronic billing is also referred to as the following:
According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Paul Hughes, director of billing and payment application strategies at the Yankee Group, "Avolent is the first EBPP vendor to deliver a voice-enabled billing solution, furthering its vision of a consistent customer experience across multiple delivery channels. Accessing bills with the ease and familiarity of the telephone system is an extremely important channel to tap. Not only will it bring interactive bill management to a wider audience, it also extends and improves the benefits of customer self-care to the end-user." About Avolent Avolent (formerly Just in Time Solutions) is the leading provider of standards-based software solutions for Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP), Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) and Interactive Customer Care (ICC). The company's modular BillCast(TM) software suite enables relationship-centric billers to deploy secure, scalable solutions for personalized billing, statement presentment, payment and service delivery that increase the value of each customer interaction. Avolent's BizCast(TM) software provides benefits to all parts of the business-to-business delivery chain -- including billers, payers, service providers, exchanges and financial institutions. Through a unique, data-centric approach, BizCast automates the entire "invoice to pay" process by helping businesses present, route, reconcile, dispute, analyze and pay invoices online. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in San Francisco, Avolent helped pioneer the Open Financial Exchange (OFX OFX Open Financial Exchange OFX Outer Fix OFX Open Effects ) standard for online bill presentment and the thin consolidator model, and continues to champion open standards, including the Interactive Financial Exchange (IFX IFX - ["Type Reconstruction with First-Class Polymorphic Values", J. O'Toole et al, SIGPLAN Notices 24(7):207-217 (Jul 1989)]. ). In October 2000 Avolent signed a definitive agreement to acquire Solant, a pioneer in the integration of advanced business-to-business and business-to-consumer EBPP and ICC applications. Avolent's customers are some of the largest billing organizations and service providers in the industry, including Advanced Radio Telecom, AT&T, CyberBills, Intuit, MasterCard, Metavante, Output Technology Solutions, Spectrum, Trivergent, YourAccounts.Com and Wells Fargo. For more information, please visit www.avolent.com or call 415/553-6400. Note to Editors: Avolent, BillCast and BizCast are registered trademarks of Avolent. All other product and company names are the property of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged. |
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