Most consumers would love to receive their bills electronically, rather than physically in envelopes. But receiving e-bills creates another challenge. These bills are usually stored on several online and offline services and need to be managed properly. GreenBills Pte Ltd, a Singaporean-based company, sees this as an opportunity and launched GreenPost.

The trend in Singapore is that even though there is a high internet usage nationwide, consumers have a low adoption rate for digital bills or e-bills. With less than 10 percent adoption rate, more than one billion pages and S$200 million in just Singapore alone are wasted due to sending out paper envelopes. Other countries are also estimated to have similar wastage patterns.

The startup that was funded by the Singapore government, a renowned university and highly experienced private angels offers an eco-friendly solution for both individuals and companies. As “Go Green” initiatives and programs have been widely implemented over the recent years, GreenPost will drive the mass adoption of less paper, if not paperless, lifestyle in Asia. That’s what the company management and investors, who come from top Indian, Singapore and US Ivy League universities, expect from this digital letterbox: An archiving and spending analysis solution.

Regardless of number, type (bills, brochures, leaflets) and status of document (current and archived) of the consumer, all bills are accessible through a single interface at all times. The service is available for free on their online portal, iOS and Android platforms (with Blackberry apps launching soon). Users can see all of their bills in PDF, table listings of all relevant info, and also charts tracking their spending habits. This can be done in summary for a quick overview or  per account in greater detail. GreenPost users also enjoy the free alert informing when their respective bills are ready or due to avoid late charges fees. At the moment, users can add major billers in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and the Philippines to their GreenPost accounts. More billers of these countries and also from Hong Kong, Indonesia and Thailand will be added soon. Payment functionality is undergoing negotiations with the various parties and the company expects to make announcements in the new year.

For companies and also billers, GreenPost’s service will be in-line with their paperless and cost-saving program when all employees and customers are urged only to print their documents when necessary. This will create a chance to increase engagement with their customers through digital channels.

GreenPost was recently awarded the Solution of The Year Award at this year Asia’s Top 50 Apps. e27 got in touch with Anand Singh, Founder and CEO of GreenBills Pte Ltd, Harveen Narulla, theDirector of Strategy and Nigel Hembrow, the Head of New Business & Sustainability, to know more about their plans for the app.

When was GreenBills established? How did you raise funding for GreenPost?

The company was established in July 2005, incubated at the National University of Singapore (NUS). NUS made an investment then, which provided the startup funding to conceptualize the idea and do initial research work. Some private angels also invested at this stage. Most of the private funds were raised from the founder Anand’s alumni network (IIT and IIM from India), who have long provided a very supportive environment for their members who are starting ventures.

The funding lasted the company through end 2007. In that period the company did research and development and a pilot with StarHub with the blessings of its then CEO, experimenting with linking to the telco’s back end systems. This was done successfully but would not for a scalable business. Hence we went back to the drawing board and re-conceptualized the business to do web-based extraction of bills from service provider websites. This instantly made the business scalable. At the end of 2008, Spring SEEDS invested in the business and we proceeded to do the build out for the re-conceptualized method of extracting bills. Together with Spring, some private angels connected to the co-founders invested. Beta was launched in June 2009.

Aside from the NUS and Spring investments, it has been challenging convincing the investment community of the potential of a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) enterprise. We attribute this largely to lack of exposure of investors in this region to B2C ventures and successful exits. B2C enterprises typically have a very different growth cycle to traditional tech and bricks-and-mortar businesses. We are slowly seeing this change as we gain traction. It also helped that the founding team and early shareholders could sustain the business through its growth phase to the present, when it is a solid, very investable business and has be able to prove its revenue models as well as land some substantial contracts.

Have been reading from your website, there is a payment functionality currently being negotiated. What is that and what is the latest status?

We are negotiating with banks to offer one-click bill pay via debit and credit card collections, on portal and mobile apps. Will be announcing it soon.

Instead of payment, any plan to enhance any other features? If yes, what kind of features?

Yes. We have planned new features to be introduced at regular intervals over next 18 months, all of which we can’t disclose. Just to give you an indication, we have completed and are testing on products which will give people more intelligence on their spending, allowing users to capture and OCR other bills from mobile, upload other documents for analysis and have calendar integration of bill due dates.

Which Asia Pacific countries does GreenPost prioritize in terms of the market?

Singapore and Malaysia (First phase), Indonesia and Thailand (Second phase), after that our prioritization are the Philippines, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and India.

Since what we have on hand is the list of available billers as of last August, would you mind sharing the most updated one?

Current billers list in several countries are Singapore: SingTel, StarHub, M1, Singapore Power, NUS Society (club), Keppel Club, Singapore Swimming Club, Sunpage, Phoenix Communications. Malaysia: Maxis, Digi, Celcom, U Mobile, Astro, Tenaga Nasional Bhd. Australia: Optus, Telstra, 3 Mobile, Citilink. Philippines: Globe, Meralco. USA: AT&T

We have seen AT&T as one of your billers. So you have already expanded to US and not just only APAC countries?

AT&T was added in response to strong user demand, from the American expat community in Singapore and Malaysia, who wanted to get their AT&T bills on the system too. We see our key area of focus as Asia although we are not limited by boundaries.

What are your short-term and long term focus, plan and target?

Until end of this year the focus will be on biller list to expand to 40 by end of the year, introduce payment collection facility, rebranding of GreenPost, prepare for our Blackberry app and introduce the first three Indonesian billers.

Next year our plan is to roll out and commercialize fully in Singapore and Malaysia, and then move to Indonesia and progressively through the region. This three year vision is to be number one place where people in Asia get all their bills, so that we can bring savings to billers, increase their customer engagement, drive huge paper savings, and develop a user community around the product. In three years we are targeting full roll out in six countries, with 4.5 million users.

Some screenshots of GreenPost’s user interface: