Into the World of Paperless and Sustainable Business

In this exclusive interview, we had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Ameet Patil, the visionary founder and CEO of www.ecobillz.com, a prominent platform dedicated to supporting sustainable Hospitality. As an avid Tech Entrepreneur, the founder shared his insights and inspirations. From the origins of their groundbreaking idea to the strategies implemented for growth and impact, this article provides a closer look into the mind and mission behind www.ecobillz.com, shedding light on the power of sustainable living in today’s world.

What motivated you to find your AI automation business? What are your goals for developing paperless industries and advancing sustainability on a global level?

The hospitality and tourism industry is a booming market that is witnessing a huge influx of travelers across the country. A recent report by Invest India, a National Investment Promotion and Facilitation Agency under the Government of India, states that by 2028, India’s tourism and hospitality industry is expected to generate $50.9 billion in visitor exports while Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) are anticipated to reach 30.5 million. This alone projects the potential of the tourism industry.

Furthermore, in this age of digitization, everything connected to tourism has become digitized. Right from searching for details about a travel destination, hotel bookings to making payments, everything is channelized through the digital route. Customers demand digital avenues of payment to have a hassle-free experience.

Ecobillz was founded with a vision of saving trees and time—thus making businesses more responsible and sustainable. Ecobillz provides an innovative digitization platform that uses AI to capture, read, and accumulate documents and data in real-time for managing the system using advanced business process automation and to churn this data for generating valuable insights for the business. Ecobillz products focus on enhancing guest experience during check-in and check-out in the front end and automated audits, reconciliation, accounts receivables, etc. in the back office.

The main goal of Ecobillz is to leverage the potential of this industry and create business operations that are completely paperless, sustainable and contactless. The tourism industry has a huge potential to achieve massive sustainability targets and make positive contributions to the impending environmental concerns.

While Ecobillz today is predominantly used in the hospitality industry, the product can be easily adapted for QSR, hospitals (health industry) and the retail industry as well.

How does www.ecobillz.com cater to the specific needs and challenges faced by businesses in the hospitality industry? Can you provide examples of how your platform has helped hotels or restaurants in adopting sustainable practices?

With the advent of digital payment modes, hotels are receiving payments not just in cash, debit cards, credit cards and electronic bank transfers but through a multitude of payment gateways. Over the recent years, these payment gateways have increased manifolds with the introduction of mobile payments. Customers have a wide array of payment options including Apple Pay, G-Pay, Samsung Pay, Paytm, Bharat Pay, Amazon Pay, etc., and many more new apps are being launched frequently. While this has made payments easy for customers, it is a humongous task for businesses to settle and reconcile the payments at the backend.

In the hospitality business, this situation gets much more complicated for payment reconciliation from travel package booking through various websites to e-loyalty programs to customer checkout.

These multiple channels of payment technology have created multiple challenges. Thus, there is a dire need for superior tech solutions to unlock the current manually driven back-office processes and prioritize them. Ecobillz Reconciliation technology puts an end to the confusion of multiple and dated settlements while showing pending payments along with the ledger mapping. It also offers the feature of auto reconciliation of multiple points of sale (POS) for a single customer as well.

All this not only enables businesses to bypass complicated payment consolidations with just a click of a button but also forgoes the traditional practice of maintaining numerous ledgers to keep track of the payments.

Many businesses in the hospitality industry are hesitant to invest in sustainable solutions due to concerns about costs. How does www.ecobillz.com address this issue and provide affordable options for sustainable management and practices?

Affordability and efficiency are always a benchmark in the hotel industry. This stands true for Ecobillz too. The solutions offered by Ecobilllz increase the efficiency of businesses, provide an end-to-end account of every transaction, save time, and thus save money. With this, the cost saving by businesses is huge typically leading to very short ROI periods.

The automated reconciliation platform at the back office helps the hotels collect the money due from various sources within a stipulated time, build the ledger and use the proceedings as planned. The automated ledger also sends a notification to those vendors whose payments are due. This level of efficiency helps the hotel chains to free up pending payments, reduce their recovery periods and remain profitable.

How does www.ecobillz.com differentiate itself from other similar platforms or services in the market? What unique features or offerings does it provide to its users?

Ecobillz does not have any competition in the true sense as our services are unique and cannot be compared. Our products are being used by almost all premium hotel chains. The solutions offer a full round package as compared to other offering in the market that are disconnected and one-off solutions.

Our unique offerings are designed to be the least intrusive and can be integrated into the existing system as a plug-n-play digitization module requiring no change in the existing system. As the platform magically works with any PMS and POS software without requiring any tight integration, its implementation cost is also minimal.

The response to the adoption of Ecobillz’s technology has been overwhelming. With ZERO sales team, we are now a go-to name in the hotel industry. Ecobillz platform and its products are being used by more than 200+ premium 5-star hotels across the country. The product has sold itself, convincing the users of the need and has created significant demand in the market for us.

In what ways does www.ecobillz.com contribute to promoting environmental sustainability?

Today, every industry uses paper. The amount of paper manufactured, used and disposed of accounts for a significant environmental concern. Paperless technology based on AI will be imperative for every industry in the future. Several industries, including, retail, hospitality, tourism, healthcare and many more heavily depend on paper. AI technology can bring in a paradigm shift in the way businesses can be done completely paperless promoting environmental sustainability.

The hospitality industry is constantly evolving, with new trends and sustainability practices emerging. How does www.ecobillz.com keep up with these changes and ensure that its platform remains relevant and adaptable to the industry’s evolving needs?

We are constantly reinventing ourselves to be in sync with the ever-changing industry dynamics. Our products and technologies constantly evolve to address traditional terrains of business operations and give them a modern outlook by integrating them with AI technologies.

AI is becoming an integral part of the function of the hospitality sector, aiding in streamlining key business procedures and assisting in strategic decision-making, with minimum turnaround time for the business owners. Ecobillz integrates its AI technology to smartly assess the challenges and offer solutions.

For instance, Ecobillz’s innovative product, Ecobillz ARC: Automated Reconciliation, uses AI right from bots to capture data, to clean data, to churn data and to reconcile transactions that arrive from multiple sources at the backend. Ecobillz Reconciliation uses AI-driven bots to get onto every related portal, search for the right data on behalf of the customer, export/download the relevant reports, and build a data lake for the hotels. Thus, even if the hotel gets aggregated payments from payment providers at the end of the month, they do not have to struggle to reconcile the payments against each of their guests.

There are various other areas where Ecobillz has designed customized future-ready solutions to leverage the growth of the hotel and tourism industry.

Arranged by Ananya Bisht