Billtrust, an accounts receivable software company, is focused on two goals: European growth and implementing artificial intelligence tools for customers, CEO Grant Halloran said four months into the role.
Many of Billtrust’s clients have “limited IT resources,” which makes it imperative for the company to offer agentic AI capabilities and automation in its software tools, Halloran said last week in an interview.
“And that's a very sophisticated task for us, because we have to meet these users and these companies where they’re at, and guide them towards how they can actually use the AI technologies in a trustworthy way,” he said.
Among its AI work, Billtrust is focused on automating communications between parties in AR; providing new ways for customers to communicate with AI functions, such as voice and chat; and a future of fully autonomous operations where AI operates under preset parameters, Halloran said.
Billtrust’s customers are “somewhere between highly interested and enthusiastic about AI adoption,” he said.
Halloran, the former chief executive of Planful, a California-based financial planning and analysis software firm, joined Billtrust in December to lead the company’s growth. Billtrust’s parent, BTRS Holdings, was acquired by Swedish private equity firm EQT for $1.7 billion in 2022.
The majority of Billtrust’s business is in the U.S., but the Nashville, Tennessee-based company is working to expand in Europe, Halloran said. “We have a lot of U.S. multinationals that are operating trans-Atlantically that are looking to adopt our platform more into Europe,” he said.
Billtrust has about 1,000 employees and 2,600 customers. Most of them are medium to larger organizations, with revenues ranging from about $50 million to tens of billions, Halloran said in an April 21 interview. Billtrust says it processes about $1 trillion in annual invoice volume.
The company’s primary competitors include HighRadius and Versapay. Other business payments firms, such as Bill Holdings, tend to focus on smaller companies, he said.
The relationships between buyers and suppliers is “kind of an adversarial interest,” in many regards, Halloran said.
Buyers seek maximum flexibility on their payments, which tend to be with credit cards, because issuers offer cash rebates, rewards programs and the float period, he said. Suppliers, meanwhile, try to balance their need for lower transaction costs on cards with a desire to satisfy their customers.
That interplay of B2B payment processes “really becomes a data science challenge,” depending on a particular industry’s dynamics, Halloran said, noting the large number of buyers, suppliers and banks across any given payment network. “What’s the optimal payment acceptance policy, and what's the best experience that I can provide for this universe of buyers?”
And, of course, not all buyers are subject to the same terms, he noted. “Our system is really about continuously operating that optimization,” he said. “It’s very much algorithmic-based. It’s very much increasingly becoming autonomous as well in the way it operates.”
For a large finance department, the software is aimed at “driving the optimal economics from that end-to-end process,” Halloran said.
