Steve Shivers, Co-founder and CEO of doxo an all-in-one bill pay service joins us in this GlobalFinTechSeries interview to share innovative growth hacks for early-stage fintech entrepreneurs while also talking about some of his biggest fintech moments from his journey so far.
Catch the excerpts:
______
Can you tell us a little about yourself Steve (including your hobbies!) and what your fintech startup journey has been like so far. How did the idea/inspiration for doxo first come about?
I grew up in Virginia but moved to Seattle about 20 years ago. I’ve found Seattle to be the perfect combination of great outdoor access – mountains, islands, open spaces – and great entrepreneurial energy. All three of the startups I’ve worked with have been mobile and/or payments focused. The last startup I worked with, Qpass, was on the first wave of enabling mobile payments. doxo, which I co-founded with two terrific colleagues from my Qpass days, is also payments focused.
While we see massive innovation in payments in recent years, there’s been a huge innovation gap for bill pay, which is half of the total payments market. This innovation gap was the inspiration for doxo. Delivering on customer-centered payment, doxo finally makes it as simple to pay a bill as it is to send a tweet and offers users the security of paying their bills without sharing their financial information across multiple billers.
By enabling billers to directly participate, doxo brings the customer engagement and payment innovation they can’t get on their own. And this network effect between customers and their billers brings new opportunities for our financial service partners.
You’ve spent time in SaaS sales in the past (Qpass), given your combined experience as a tech sales professional and now a fintech startup entrepreneur, what are some of the biggest leadership hacks you’ve come to adopt over time?
The greatest growth hack for our company is making data radically transparent. One of our internal operating commitments is that every single person in the company should know what metrics they impact from their position, and easily see those metrics every single day. In fact, almost every inch of free wall space at doxo is covered with large screen monitors and dashboards that show our employees transparent data on how we’re disrupting the payments industry.
We make the data available as close to real-time as possible, so we effectively close our books across the entire business – from revenue, to expenses, and KPIs – every single day. It’s a continual investment, but it empowers everyone in the company to contribute and drive improvement. And it saves a LOT of meetings.
We’ve extended this data transparency concept to our customers as well. When users have transparent information about their bills, they make better decisions. Our data group, doxoINSIGHTS publishes anonymized average bill payments for the nine most common bill categories across 900+ regions in the country. You can see the data at www.doxo.com/insights
We’d love to know what some of your top FinTech predictions for 2020 are? What are some of the most innovative solutions by fintech startups that you’ve come across in the recent years?
Some very exciting exits have happened recently in fintech, with more than $30B in M+A underway (Plaid, Credit Karma, eTrade, Honey, just to name a few). That said, our expectation is that there is going to be a dramatic reduction in new financing, venture investment, and M+A activity for quite a while until we come through the other side.
We expect a very rapid flight to quality in the fintech startup market, meaning businesses that don’t just show the ability to grow – but also do so in an extremely capital efficient manner. We’re doing this now at doxo and expect it to continue; we believe we’re well positioned to endure and thrive because we operate in an extremely large market that will be significantly disrupted by this crisis.
Can you talk about some of the most innovative fintech apps and platforms in the global payments and banking industry that according to you are set to create new benchmarks?
Plaid is a partner, and they represent the gold standard of API-first innovation. Stripe, Adyen, and Square are simplifying payments for millions of businesses. Remitly is a terrific innovator, serving the relatively underbanked immigrant work force.
A vast number of U.S. households find themselves short of cash when it comes time to pay their bills.
This is only going to be more exacerbated in the coming weeks and months. It has never been more important to stay on top of household cash flow and track due dates for all bills in one place.
By being aligned with financial health and consumer protection, we offer very timely benefits for consumers and billers alike, and other fintech startups with a similar focus will be best positioned in this period. We also see a variety of startups trying to solve the problem of access to capital without onerous, predatory fees. All are empowering consumers and businesses in new ways.
Read More: GlobalFintechSeries Interview with Hamed Arbabi, CEO & Founder at VoPay
How according to you will AI and other innovations impact how Finance Technology Solutions for global payments will evolve in future?
Data is driving much of fintech innovation. At doxo we know that every single consumer represents a unique mix of service providers, financial services, credit, and payday cash flow that drives their bill payments – which represents more than 50% of their household spend each month. Every single biller serves their customer not in isolation, but as part of that household’s service ecosystem. By leveraging the aggregated data generated from millions of households across our network, making local neighborhood bill expenses and market trends transparent to both sides, optimizing processing using network data, and intelligently recommending relevant service and financial providers, we create new benefits for both customers and providers.
What are some of the biggest challenges in fintech that innovators and other startups often face, what are your top best practices that you’d like to share to help future fintech entrepreneurs in this space?
The rent-seeking behavior of traditional financial service companies was developed over many decades, and the regulatory, processing, and other protective moats are formidable. So when potential entrepreneurs see obvious financial service problems that can and should be solved, the temptation is to launch in with the assumption that incumbents are stupid, or just haven’t seen it. You’ve got to reject that cognitive bias, and instead figure out what has allowed that bad experience to survive in a world where it should have been fixed already. Understanding that will tell you if you’re really on to something.
Tag (mention/write about) the one person in the fintech industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read!
Here in Seattle, Remitly is doing great work enabling much simpler, lower cost international remittances. I especially admire how they’ve aligned their financial innovation with the mission of empowering underserved consumers. Matt Oppenheimer, Remitly CEO and founder, is a great entrepreneur and exceptionally thoughtful about how business and social impacts need to align.
Your favorite FinanceTech quote
Not fintech specific, but helpful for any entrepreneur, is my favorite Jeff Bezos quote:
One thing I learned within the first couple of years of starting a company is that inventing and pioneering involve a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time.
We’d love to know what some of your future plans for doxo are! Any other startup plans or fintech startups in mind?!
Our business has grown about 6X in the past four years, and while the coming months have a great deal of uncertainty, we still believe we’re managing operations carefully in this challenging time so we can maintain growth and profitability. Our primary objective is to ensure we emerge from this crisis a stronger company with even greater upside potential.
But we’re just getting started on some of the most interesting opportunities. doxo has created a network effect between billers and their customers, so as our flywheel accelerates, it expands the ways we can uniquely create value for both sides. What energizes me is this systemic aspect of our business, relative to more common binary product/market models. This means we have a sort of continual fractal-type expansion of the opportunities we can pursue, and we create compounding benefits as we scale. This keeps it very interesting.
Read More: GlobalFintechSeries Interview with Arcady Lapiro, CEO and Co-Founder at Agora Services
doxo is a simple, secure all-in-one bill pay service that facilitates secure payment to any biller, with any payment method, on any device. doxo currently serves over three million paying users who can make payments to over 60,000 local and national businesses, making doxo the largest bill pay directory in the nation. Billers on the network get paid directly, fast and free – and consumers have complete bill pay independence over when and how they pay their bills. doxo grew its user base by more than 70 percent in the past year and is expanding its team to further accelerate growth and change the bill pay landscape to focus on the customer. doxo investors include MDV, Sigma Partners, and Bezos Expeditions. doxo is based in Seattle, WA.
Steve Shivers is co-founder and CEO of doxo. Prior to starting doxo, Steve was GM/SVP of OpenMarket (www.openmarket.com). Steve started Openmarket as a division of Qpass, and rapidly grew the business, enabling hundreds of content and app companies to deliver digital content to more than 200M consumers across more than 50 mobile networks. Prior to OpenMarket, Steve was SVP Sales and Marketing at Qpass, a mobile payment company that provided digital payment platforms to mobile networks. Amdocs acquired Qpass, including the OpenMarket division, in 2006. Prior to Qpass, Steve was GM Europe and VP of mobile for Infospace.com. Steve grew up in Virginia and has a mechanical engineering degree from Rice University and an MBA from UVA.
