Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jonathan Maietta – Needham & Company.
Jonathan Maietta – Needham & Company
Congratulations on the deal. It sounds like a real strategic win. It accelerates the opportunity so it looks like a good deal all the way around.
Can you help us frame the size of the opportunity, not to put a time constraint around it, but to help us think about how this could scale over time?
Robert Eberle
If you think about it, in the U.S. alone, and the opportunity frankly for us is to bring this platform international. As you know, we've got significant distribution and customer base internationally, but in the U.S. alone, it's estimated that there are 13 billion invoices a year. If you take a look at 80% of those invoices today are paper, and the estimates for what that paper process can cost, can be anywhere from several dollars if you're in the top quartile, to numbers that get to be $15.00 to $20.00 if you're in the bottom quartile.
Automating that process and driving even a portion of that cost as revenue is a major opportunity. It also is significant what we're doing with Bank of America, is also very strategic, because not only will we drive the revenues into transaction volume and transaction fees for the use of the platform, from a bank perspective, it's how you provide technology.
If you're providing technology in a vendor network that automates your customers financial supply chain, what you've done in terms of retention of that customer in cash balances that will stay in the bank, with the bank from that customer, financing opportunities, it's a very strategic platform.
So it's part of the reason we're delighted to be doing with the bank as a channel, and frankly in the future, we see other banks coming on as channels.
Jonathan Maietta – Needham & Company
Is this a network that the bank had been growing or had they kind of reached full potential within their base?
Robert Eberle
No, absolutely. As the network that the bank was growing was I think that the part that they looked, it really is a wonderful combination. If you take a look at what the bank had done very successfully, they've gotten over 500 customers and nearly 80,000 vendors on the network. The piece that was more of a challenge was the enhancement of the product set, running the SAS offering, all the things that are core competencies of Bottomline.
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