EDS targets more billing and payments work

By PETER GRIFFIN

IT services company EDS is pushing for more outsourced billing work, hoping to take over billing and payments processing for local authorities and utilities.

The company wants to repeat deals such as that it sealed with the Auckland Regional Council just before Christmas.

EDS took over billing the council's 450,000 ratepayers in an $11 million, three-year deal. Outsourcing the work will save the council $1 million over that period.

Similar deals are expected to contribute to EDS' growth this year, as major new IT outsourcing business remains thin on the ground.

Already a major billing outsourcer, EDS manages the system for Telecom as part of its IT partnership with the telco. EDS also processes hundreds of thousands of cheques and bank statements each day, printing the statements at a plant in Christchurch.

Managing director Rick Ellis said local authorities, which regularly sent bills to hundreds of thousands of ratepayers, were the most obvious potential customers, along with electricity companies.

EDS New Zealand would also pitch for billing work offshore, leveraging off a lower cost structure than in countries such as the US.

EDS New Zealand was putting more emphasis on such work, Ellis said.

It now had a formal route to pitch globally for contact centre and application development through the company's Best Shores programme, which targets low-cost countries such as New Zealand, South Africa and India. EDS is building a major new contact centre in Mumbai.

"It's a programme where EDS underwrites the quality of a service," Ellis said. "I can envisage hundreds of jobs being created using the US$22 billion ($40.6 billion) EDS, of which I'm a small piece, as a go to market."

Ellis has hosted a stream of visitors from EDS head office since joining the company in October.

He now intends to use that link into EDS to generate business, hopefully attracting work for local IT companies in the process.

"We are a low-cost country but we're not selling it," he said.

But he called for more Government support in attracting interest from international IT players to invest locally and partner home-grown IT companies.

"The level of incentives available in New Zealand is frankly pathetic," he said.