CEO Perspective:
The Bottomline on Innovation

Bottomline’s CEO, Joe Mullen, Shares Insights on Evolutionary Trends in Financial Process Automation

I’ve always found new customer product launches to be a particularly exciting time here at Bottomline. It’s not merely witnessing the culmination of hard work and dedication of our team, but the satisfaction in knowing that our existing and future customers will be better equipped to improve their businesses and deliver greater value to their clients. Earlier this month when we launched Sprinter®, the industry’s most complete Purchase-to-Pay solution, it marked another milestone in achieving our long-term vision to deliver to you best-in-class financial process automation. Automation that matches the ever changing needs of our customers.

Believe it or not, the road to financial process automation began back in the 1980s with the introduction of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Back then, organizations implemented ERP systems as a mechanism for improving internal process efficiency. It’s a stage on the evolutionary path we refer to as “Autonomous Automation.” The value proposition was simple: a lower cost of conducting business and an easier way to get from the start of an internal process to the finish.

By the time Bottomline came along in 1989, ERP users were beginning to feel the limitations of their systems. As business payments requirements became more complex and demanding, Bottomline provided our customers a technology bridge that extended the capabilities of their ERP systems giving them lower cost, flexible and secure payment systems. These new systems offered the ability to make payments in a variety of formats, either electronic or paper check, local or remote. Since then, we’ve never looked back.

As businesses moved aggressively in the late 1990s to align operational functions and processes as a way to save money, we witnessed the rise of Shared Service Center models. This is a stage we refer to as “Consolidated Automation.” It was at this stage that Bottomline again demonstrated its market leadership by developing enterprise payment platforms that offered centralized control and local business flexibility. Flexibility that provides visibility into payments status for cash flow reporting while ensuring adherence to enterprise-wide payments standards and best practices.

With the introduction of Sprinter this month, we are once again supporting the next tier of value within the financial supply chain, introducing proven functionality that links financial transactions and data beyond the walls of your enterprise to your suppliers, vendors, banking partners and customers. Sprinter supports this latest stage of evolution we call “Collaborative Automation,” which increases the speed of business, lowers costs and improves information through an interconnected business process. With Sprinter, Bottomline remains at the forefront of what is certain to be the most promising and beneficial stage of financial process automation to date.

As you have in the past, I would encourage all of our customers to rely on us to help you discover the potential benefits and successful implementation of these “Collaborative Automation” solutions. I would also like to thank you for your feedback and continued interest in improving your business. It is that interest and feedback that drives our innovation; innovation that continues to deliver to the bottomline.