Support Systems: Billing/Analysis Vendor CTI Rebrands, Expands

CTI’s Brad Houlberg

CTI Group (Holdings) Inc. has rebranded itself CTI, which stands for Customer Transaction Intelligence, and expanded its billing and bill analysis services to enterprises in addition to service providers.

“We’re all about digging into data for the customer,” says CEO Brad Houlberg.

The company’s mission is to assist companies in three main areas: generating revenue for business customers through monthly transaction analysis capabilities; increasing customer lifetime value through higher retention and improved satisfaction; and controlling internal and external costs through analysis tools that intelligently manage transactions.

CTI is doing that using the arsenal it built up through its “reverse acquisition” of two other companies in the past 24 months, says Houlberg.

The recently expanded company, which retains the CTI name as well as its stock ticker symbol, includes billing company CellTech of Houston, Texas; the original CTI, which offers telemanagement and call accounting through vendor channels; and billing analysis company CDS. With offices in Indianapolis and London, 35-year-old CTI now employs 100 people, serves about 70 percent of U.S. content and service providers, and helps its customers serve about 100 million end users.

Now CTI is expanding beyond its service provider base to target enterprise customers directly with billing and billing analysis tools. Houlberg explains this will allow businesses and other organizations to distribute costs between their various departments as well as among outside vendors and other partners. CTI says it recently completed extensive research with user and customer groups to produce products and service solutions for end users in various fields such as health care, finance, utilities and air/ground shipping.

Research is one of the key tenets of CTI. Its studies show about 90 percent of companies surveyed review, monitor and analyze their communications bills, more than half of which come from more than one service provider and almost half of those companies don’t use any billing analysis tools or services.

Outsourcing accounts for 80 percent of CTI’s current business. The company’s product line includes the MagnaFlex convergent billing and customer care system, which is in use by six customers in production convergent applications. A telemanagement and call accounting tool called Proteus was the company’s second product and SmartBill is CTI’s electronic bill analysis product.

Houlberg says one of CTI’s key differentiators is it holds the patent on an IT process to handle “enormous volumes of transactions.”

CTI calls the technology TransACT — which describes the process of collecting data records, processing and indexing data, and sending it to the end user electronically so it can be “sliced and diced” by the customer.

Houlberg says CTI so far has collected $50 million on this patent and the company is working to respond to more requests to use the patent. TransACT is used for IT services, call centers, online account management and billing, and electronic billing presentation and payment by utilities, financial services companies, cable and wireless operators, health care organizations and air/ground shipping companies.

• Annual churn at service providers can be 25 percent to 30 percent

• Cost of producing a paper business bill is at least $17

• Billing disputes lead to cash flow delay — often 30 days to 60 days past the due date

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