Founded by former NoCreditCard.com employees Clay Douglass, Mitch Platt and Andreas Bischoff, Local Billing was designed to expand the billing capabilities of U.S. and Canadian webmasters and enable them to process users from every country around the world based on the local currency and local billing methods those users are accustomed to. Douglass will serve as company president and Platt will serve as vice president of sales and marketing.
“It’s something no one has done yet,” Kourosh, business development manager for Local Billing, told XBiz. “U.S. webmasters have more traffic in any given market than the webmasters situated in those particular countries because they have more affiliates sending them traffic. Except in a lot of cases, foreign markets can’t even pay to enter their members area.”
A year in the making, the Local Billing business model offers 30 different payment methods – including Visa and Mastercard – that are used around the world, and which Douglass said have been carefully researched and tested to only include those solutions that are widely used and geographically specific.
Douglass cited two favorite billing methods in both Ireland and Spain, the laser card and the debito directo, that have been incorporated into Local Billing’s offerings.
“We went to every country and researched what the online billing methods of choice were,” Douglass told XBiz. “Many webmaster saw a void in the international market because of language barriers, but this gives them much wider access to those international markets than ever before.”
In building the company and developing the top ways to provide international billing options, Douglass said they went through five fundamental steps: they translated the local billing process into the local language; translated the currency out of U.S. dollars into the foreign currency so the price doesn’t show up in U.S. dollars; they added every payment solution available in that market, eliminating the ones that didn’t work; and they complied with all the regulations in each of the particular markets that relate to billing.
Additionally, there are no fees involved in setting up an account with Local Billing, and charges are applied on a per-transaction basis, similar to most other IPSPs.
Local Billing also developed a customer service base that can function in 22 languages.
“At the end of the day, it’s a simple business, but invariable, people have questions and we make sure they have access to Kourosh and Mitch,” Douglass said. “We want to make sure we grow slowly and grow strong.”
Local Billing’s 50-person staff is located around the world in seven different offices, including Los Angeles, where Kourosh is headquartered, and Barcelona, where Douglass and Platt maintain operations.
Local Billings' central bank is located in Switzerland, Douglass said, in addition to numerous other banks in different zones around the world.
