Hank Riner: The Attention Grabber

Efficiency and accuracy may be the historic hallmarks of a good transaction document company, but in a world competing for your customers’ attention the new hallmark may be marketing. OSG Billing Services’ new CEO Hank Riner is somewhat of a marketing guru, having designed the first online campaign planner for SourceLink, the fifth largest direct marketing services provider in North America. He spoke with Billing & OSS World Editor in Chief Tim McElligott recently about his plans for OSG.

OSG's Hank Riner

Your board brought you on to take OSG to the next level. What does that mean for the company?

We are in the business of creating and distributing transaction documents — primarily invoices and bills for customers — and our growth strategy is to provide more value in that process. That means in addition to getting the bill to the right person at the right time to accelerate cash flow for our customers, which is a very basic service, we also provide a number of marketing initiatives. They really use the power of that transaction document as a promotional vehicle. It’s their primary means of communication with customers for strengthening brand identity and loyalty and the best mechanism to sell additional products and services.

So our business model will not change; our growth will come from continuing to add value to that transaction document. We will continue to help them understand their customers and improve their messaging by making it more targeted using data modeling and analytics. And we’ll help them migrate where appropriate into the digital world with electronic bill payment and processing. It’s all wrapped around a more powerful transaction document as a marketing tool.

What about growing the size and reach of your company?

Five years ago we opened an office in Tempe, Ariz., and we now do about 30 to 35 percent of our processing from that facility. So I don’t think it’s out of the question that over the next five to seven years we will have a facility in the Midwest and maybe even in the Southeast, which would give us a national footprint and improve delivery times for clients. With that growth will come continued value enhancements for customers both in paper products and digital services.

What about consolidation?

We think one reason you don’t see lot of consolidation in our industry is a lot of the providers are small family businesses that prefer to stay independent and don’t want to join a large public corporation. But we do want to grow. Most if it will be the old-fashioned way: organic. But if we see acquisition opportunities out there that would be a good strategic fit for OSG, we would certainly look at them. We did acquire a company called Imagecom last year here in New Jersey and that acquisition has worked very well for us and Imagecom.