About a week and a half ago, doxo launched.
Doxo was founded by a guy I have known for almost ten years, and he’s one of those guys who comes across as very funny and very laid back, but at the same time he’s always the smartest guy in the room. By a lot.
I had heard about doxo about a year ago, and I knew that it had something to do with billing, but that it was very much a secret as to what they were up to, and for a lot of reasons I just hadn’t crossed paths with my friend Steve for a while, so I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask him for more information.
So then they launched and I learned that it’s an online bill pay site that’s free and doesn’t have any advertising that is designed to eliminate paper from billing (the billing organizations pay doxo and that’s how they make their money).
Seemed like a great idea to a guy who hasn’t dabbled much in the world of online bill pay, until I had lunch last week with my friend Keith, and Keith asked “how is that different from online banking at Bank of America?” Great question, I thought. “I don’t know,” was my response, “but I am meeting Steve on Friday and I will ask him.”
Unsurprisingly, Steve’s answer to the question confirmed that as always, he is the smartest guy in the room. There are several very compelling reasons why this is a really big deal:
1) Free. Free isn’t really one of them, but it’s great.
2) No ads. While it may not seem like a big deal, it is. You and I might ignore the ads on the Bank of America site, but the merchants don’t. So my visa company agrees to share my billing information with Bank of America for me to see (and pay), but when I look at it, Bank of America bombards me with ads from competing credit card companies, and that obviously makes my credit card company eager for an alternative.
3) Data. Data is something the Bank of America service doesn’t offer (and I don’t want to pick on B of A, but WellsFargo is so bad at online bill pay, they really aren’t worth mentioning here). My credit card company and Comcast and Puget Sound Energy, and The New York Times are all able to push the information to B of A about wbat I owe them, but B of A doesn’t store any of the information. Doxo does. So if you want to go back a month, or a year, or whatever, doxo has all of the data of all of the billing you have ever done with them. That’s big.
4) Like Facebook or LinkedIn. Bank of America is the one that has a “deal” with the billing organizations. Not you and the billing organizations. We all know what it means to “friend” someone on Facebook or add someone to our LinkedIn network. Once someone accepts that invitation, it opens a trusted exchange between the two parties. That’s what doxo does between us and the billing organizations. Just like friending, the relationship is between us and the billing organization and that’s what unlocks the trusted exchange between parties. That’s a really, really big differentiator.
So now I get it and I am eager to start using doxo. You should too.
-Ric
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