“transactional documents” are mailed each year in the United States, amounting to some $35 billion in annual expenses for U.S. businesses. The company says it can save businesses around 80 percent of those costs, all while allowing Doxo to support itself, remain free to consumers, and help consumers and customers get organized, all while lower customers’ carbon footprints.
Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? But if a simple solution is this easy—as Frisch wonders—then why hasn’t it been done before? Well, to start, in many ways it has. Today most banks and credit card companies offer online payment options, and online payments have grown with the success of companies like CheckFree and PayPal. But while the technology is available, Frisch says less than 15 percent of U.S. households have gone paperless.
“When you look at the consumer space, you see online is really taking off,” he says. Still, there’s an “adoption gap” between people who want to go paperless—those already paying many bills, and managing bank accounts and credit cards online, but still getting paper bills and statements in the mail and the minority who have taken the plunge to handling everything online.
Frisch says there are four primary reasons that consumers get trapped in this gap. First, they have too many logins for too many accounts to manage separately—the average household has more than 22 providers, each with different online accounting capabilities, he says. Second, many people still like keeping paper records.
“A lot of customers want to have a copy of their bill, or their document, or the statement in their file,” he says. “You may not be able to find it, but you know it’s there.”
Third, balancing the checkbook has become a habitual chore; with so many different accounts and due dates, many people find it’s easiest to manage their bills by making a point of sitting down to pay them regularly, be it once a month, or once a week. Lastly, bills aren’t the only things that come in the mail. A lot of people figure, according to Frisch, “Why bother going halfway paperless with a company, when that’s only half the problem?”
Frish says Doxo solves these core problems by grouping all or most of a consumers’ billing and record-keeping tasks in a single place online, with only one password to keep track of. The system helps consumers easily manages bill payment, correspondence, automatic transactions, to do lists, and secure document storage.
“Doxo is very much designed to be a sophisticated online file cabinet,” Frisch says. “This is very much for the everyday person—quite honestly it’s for people like me, who want to go paperless but haven’t yet.”
At the very least, he says, “this is a much bigger way to manage your important documents than having mail.” And having fewer physical papers, and more electronic documents, does sound slightly more organized than a file cabinet.
