In most organizations billing is still largely a paper-based process that provides little in the way of value-add to the customer but lots of cost to the business. Highmark, a provider of health insurance, dramatically altered its approach to this business process by standardizing on e-billing software. According to Al Dodson, Highmark's product manager for e-billing, the company's various subsidiaries had multiple approaches to billing based on a wide variety of systems. By centralizing all that billing activity, Highmark significantly lowered its costs by giving customers incentives to move to e-billing processes over the internet that eliminated paperwork.
To accomplish this, Highmark needed a neutral e-billing platform because retrofitting an existing billing system to suit the needs of a particular subsidiary would have required each of the other business units to change its own internal IT processes too drastically. Instead, the company now uses the neutral system as a clearinghouse for its e-billing activities.
Source: Baseline, http://www.baselinemag.com