We were in The Irish Times last Friday, (April 2, 2010)
thanks to Gordon Smith and the Irish Times team.
GETITKEEPIT.COM, a new website for managing people’s utility bills, has signed commercial agreements with Vodafone and Oxigen that will keep the service free for consumers.
The site lets people store and manage their bills from a range of service providers in a single location. Currently it handles bills from 12 companies including Airtricity, Bord Gáis, ESB, Eircom, Oxigen and UPC, as well as all four mobile phone networks.
Getitkeepit.com doesn’t need commercial agreements with providers to be able to provide its service. The deals with Vodafone and Oxigen differ because they will give the site a share in the money that those providers save on printing and postage by switching their customers to paperless billing.
Chief executive Alan Coleman said the agreements would allow the service to remain free for users. The company hopes to have 40,000 subscribers by the end of the year.
Paperless billing is still in its infancy in Ireland, partly because regulations mean many providers can’t compel their customers to adopt it. Vodafone has more than 2.15 million customers in Ireland but fewer than 2 per cent are thought to use paperless billing.
“There’s a stark dichotomy between us doing so much online – banking, shopping and socialising – and yet we aren’t doing this,” Mr Coleman said.
Having all bills in one location allows consumers to analyse their spending patterns more closely. The site displays graphs comparing the bill costs to the same time a year ago. A monthly forecast feature to be added soon will show people estimates of how much their next bill is likely to cost. Mr Coleman said the data was also valuable to service providers as it could be used to identify trends over time.
Future plans for the site include a live feature to calculate a person’s carbon footprint based on their energy consumption.
The company employs five people and intends to take on a further three or five staff by the end of the year. It is closing a €400,000 funding round from Enterprise Ireland and private investors, ahead of a UK launch this summer.
Click here to view the Irish Times article
GetitKeepit.com was featured on Silicon Republic.
9 March 2010 By John Kennedy, Editor
“The free service aims to revolutionise the way people gain control over their utility bills and other important documents.
Alan Coleman and Jim Hannon established the company in 2007, after leaving senior roles in Accenture and Irish State broadcaster RTE, respectively. They have spent the last three years developing their patent-pending platform.
“The idea for GetitKeepit grew from a personal frustration of dealing with piles of paperwork every month,” said Coleman, GetitKeepit CEO.
“I wanted to develop a free service that would bring me the sort of convenience and control that I get from my online bank.”
About GetitKeepit
Using GetitKeepit’s service, consumers can now sign up with 10 of the largest service providers in the State and have all their current and historical bills available and analysed in one secure online environment.
No longer is there any need to remember multiple user names and passwords. GetitKeepit automatically analyses all of your bills and gives you useful analysis using clear and simple graphs.
GetitKeepit can even remind you when new bills arrive, when they are due for payment and allow you to make a payment if you want.
The key advantages to using the service are: one location to organise and analyse bills and less of the clutter through your letterbox, it reduces the threat of identity theft using bank-standard encryption to protect documents, it significantly reduces your carbon footprint and all old bills or documents can be accessed 24/7 and year-round from anywhere online.
“The vision for the business is that GetitKeepit is a smart post box which will help people manage and control all their home administration, starting with utility bills,” Coleman explained.
“Our site offers this service free to consumers and we are paid by service providers who save money by interacting with their customers online and turning off paper bills.
“We have already agreed to an active partnership with one of the leading mobile operators and we will be announcing a number of additional relationships in the coming weeks,” he said.
GetitKeepit were a winner of Eircom’s Web Innovation Fund in 2009.
The business is engaged in funding with support from Enterprise Ireland and some private investors.
It has already attracted a high-profile advisory board including senior executives such as Colm Long, online operations director EMEA, Facebook, Ian Rosarius, CIO British Telecom Wholesale and a senior investment banker at Merrill Lynch responsible for Telecoms Media and Technology.
By John Kennedy”
View the article on Silicon Republic