Ecobillz aims to be a household name in the global hospitality industry

Ecobillz is a digitization platform which can digitize in real-time documents printed from any software. It uses AI to capture, read, and accumulate documents and data in real-time for use as a document management system, advanced business process automation and to churn this data for generating valuable insights of your business.

In this interview, Ecobillz’s Founder & CEO Dr. Ameet Patil discusses the company’s products, data privacy, and the future plans with Startagist.

Edited excerpts:

1. Can you provide an overview of how Ecobillz works and how it helps hospitality businesses digitize their operations?

Ecobillz is an innovative digitization platform that uses AI to capture, read, and accumulate documents and data in real-time for use as a document management system, advanced business process automation and to churn this data for generating valuable insights of your business. It is aiming to build up a way for business operations without the usage of paper and make contactless business easy. Ecobillz is founded with a vision of saving trees and time—thus making businesses more responsible and sustainable. While Ecobillz today is predominantly used in the hospitality industry, the product can be adapted successfully for hospitals (health industry) and retail as well

2. How does Ecobillz use artificial intelligence to automate back-office processes? Can you provide some specific examples?

In a technology-enabled world, hotels are receiving payments from multiple sources including traditional methods like cash, debit cards, credit cards, and electronic bank transfers. The number of payment gateways has just multiplied with the introduction of mobile payments. With Apple Pay, G-pay, Samsung Pay, Paytm, Amazon Pay, and multiplying with every new app launched, it is a humongous task to settle the payments at the backend. While this is just an example of payments received, the scenario gets grimmer if we look at the payment reconciliation of the entire hospitality chain — from travel package booking through various websites to e-loyalty programs to customer checkout.

As the entire challenge has been created by multiple channels of payment technology, it is imperative that it will need superior tech solutions to unlock the current manually driven back-office processes and prioritize them. Dedicated finance and commerce product/platforms like Ecobillz Reconciliation has put an end to the mayhem of multiple and dated settlements and also showing the pending payments along with the ledger mapping, not to speak about auto reconciliation of multiple points of sale (POS) for a single customer as well.

3. How does Ecobillz ensure data security and privacy for its clients?

Ecobillz maintains highest standards of security and is undergoing ISO 27001 certifications and SOC2 type II compliance – these are industry standards for security in clouds for companies offering SaaS products. Most of our customers also do their own due diligence through external consultants to check on the security system.

4. What types of hospitality businesses are currently using Ecobillz, and how have they benefited from the platform?

We have been growing more than three times in the last two years with revenues doubling every year, since inception. The traction is mind-boggling. As of date, there is no hospitality or hotel chain that does not know about Ecobillz, at least in India. All the top hotel chains in India are our customers. With its current widespread usage in the premium hospitality chains in India, Ecobillz aims to become a household name in the hospitality industry world over.

5. Can you explain how Ecobillz integrates with other software systems that a hospitality business might be using?

The unique thing about Ecobillz is it requires no integration what-so-ever. Ecobillz can be seamlessly made to work with any software system that the establishment is already using. It does not need any special changes. This effortless on-boarding process attracts clients – as it is more like a plug and play tool, which starts performing immediately, as soon as it is implemented.

6. What kind of training and support do you offer to help clients get the most out of the Ecobillz platform?

During the initial implementation phase, Ecobillz conducts training for the staff who will be handling the software for enabling them to make the best use of the platform and achieve effective results.

7. Are there any limitations to the types of data or documents that Ecobillz can digitize and manage?

No, Ecobillz can read and reconcile any type of documents/data from any source and in any standard format. There is no limitations to access by the AI-driven bots that the system use. All types of data and documents is readable by the platform.

8. What are some future developments or features that Ecobillz is working on?

Affordability and efficiency are always a benchmark in the hotel industry. Hence, Ecobillz is working on automated solutions like check-in kiosks for hotels. It is more like the check-in kiosk at the airports, which are tailor-made for the hotel requirements.

Along the same line, Ecobillz is also working on automated photo-id verification. Photo-ids are a mandatory requirement while checking in. It has to be verified and collected for every customer. There are frauds that happen through laminated ids with unrecognizable photographs—and the hotel issues room keys without very strong verification, given the problem of time and unwilling to offend the guest. Our solution will read that photo id and find if it is genuine or not in seconds—more like the infra-red machine that is used to identify fake currency notes.

9. Can you discuss pricing and any potential cost savings for businesses using Ecobillz?

Ecobillz does not have any competition in the true sense. Hence, we are not in a position to compare pricing. But yes, given the product – premium hotel chains use our products. As mentioned, there is not many top-line hotel chain who are not using our products.

The cost saving by the customers, in the long run, is incomparable. Efficiency in the system saves not only time but money. Happy guests also imply return visits. Even if one discount return visits, the sheer automated reconciliation at the back office help the hotels to collect the money due from various sources within a stipulated time, build the ledger and use the proceedings as planned. The automated ledger also sends a notification to those vendors who has not yet paid-up. The efficiency helps the hotel chains to free up pending payments and remain profitable.

10. How does Ecobillz differentiate itself from other digitization and automation platforms in the market?

What we are offering is totally new in the market and no comparable competition exists.
Designed to be the least intrusive of technologies that can be installed as a plug-n-play digitization module requiring no change in existing PMS/POS, Ecobillz can be integrated within the existing system for being implemented immediately. As the platform magically works with any PMS and POS software without requiring any tight integration, its implementation cost is also affordable to businesses.

Every industry uses paper and paperless technology based on AI is definitely going to be the next big thing in the market. The response to Ecobillz’s proposition itself has been overwhelming. With ZERO sales team, we are now a household name in hotel industry. Ecobillz platform and its products are being used by more than 200+ premium 5-star hotels across the country. The product has sold itself convincing the users of the need and has created significant demand in the market for us.