Bottomline Technologies' Legal eXchange Service to Provide Litigation Management for National Grid USA.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

PORTSMOUTH, N.H.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 25, 2004

Regional utility company to automate the electronic receipt and management of legal expenditures to reduce costs and improve workflow

Bottomline Technologies (NASDAQ: EPAY), a leading global technology provider of Financial Resource Management (FRM) software and managed services, today announced that National Grid USA (NYSE: NGG) has chosen to implement Bottomline's Legal eXchange(TM) to automate the electronic receipt and management of legal expense budgets and invoices. Legal eXchange is a Web-based service that simplifies the complex task of managing corporate legal expenditures to improve workflow and reduce the time, resources, and expenses required to process legal invoices.

National Grid USA is a utility that serves more than three million electricity customers throughout New England and more than 500,000 natural gas customers in New York via its five retail utility companies - Massachusetts Electric, Nantucket Electric, Narragansett Electric, Granite State Electric and Niagara Mohawk. While in the process of merging the billing systems of multiple companies, National Grid sought a solution that would reduce paper output, enable seamless legal management across disparate systems, and provide enhanced budgeting and reporting capabilities across all the companies.

National Grid Supervisor of Legal Services, Rita Carlucci, said, "Other systems that we evaluated required a programmer to modify or create rules for reporting, which was a time-consuming and expensive consideration. Legal eXchange has a very flexible rules engine that will enable us to internally create and modify our own rules in minutes. This feature can help control costs by enabling us to create rules to monitor specific law firms, legal matters, and even specific line items." Carlucci added, "As a Web-based service, Legal eXchange also gives us the ability to manage our legal budget from any location without having to make changes to our existing IT environments."

Bottomline Vice President Transactional Services North America, Tom Gaillard, commented, "Bottomline is pleased to add National Grid to its fast-growing list of Legal eXchange users. Bottomline's Legal eXchange enables corporate clients and their outside counsel to set budgets for individual matters, review progress against those budgets, and view comprehensive reports to maximize the efficiency of their legal resources, making it an attractive choice for cost-conscious companies."

About Bottomline Technologies

Bottomline Technologies (NASDAQ: EPAY) is a leading global technology provider of Financial Resource Management (FRM) solutions. Bottomline's comprehensive set of FRM offerings enables businesses and financial institutions to more effectively manage their critical financial transactions, cash decisions and trading partner relationships, leveraging the Web. FRM applications include Electronic Payments and Cash Management, Electronic Invoice Receipt and Management, Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP), Electronic Banking and Information Reporting. Founded in 1989, Bottomline maintains its corporate headquarters in Portsmouth, NH and international headquarters in Reading, England. For more information, visit Bottomline on the Web at www.bottomline.com, or dial [phone] or [phone].

Bottomline Technologies and Legal eXchange are trademarks of Bottomline Technologies, Inc., which may be registered in certain jurisdictions.

Cautionary Language

This press release may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding expected benefits of use of the Company's products and future growth or results. Among the important factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are competition, market demand, technological change, strategic relationships, recent acquisitions, international operations and general economic conditions. For additional discussion of factors that could impact Bottomline Technologies' financial results, refer to the Company's Form 10K filed September 2003, Form 10Q filed February 2004 and any recently filed Form 8K's.