Bill Express announced to the ASX at 1:41pm today that the Directors have resolved to appoint administrators to the company today.
Of the 3,600 newsagents using Bill Express I’d estimate than at least 2,500 are as of today without mobile phone recharge, phonecards and other products and services offered by Bill Express. Most of these newsagents continue to have $495 a month (plus GST) taken from their account by a company associated with Bill Express.
The tragedy is that newsagents stumped up close to $90 million in capital for Bill Express in the form of leases for equipment. It is these leases for now useless equipment, which unlocked the millions for the company, which newsagents have been left with. The wash up will make interesting reading but do little to help newsagents who will carry a huge financial burden.
The ANF, the newsagent’s own national association, robustly promoted Bill Express to newsagents and profited handsomely from this arrangement. The association has all but washed its hands of Bill Express as soon as revenue from the company dried up. I’d expect newsagents to quit the ANF over this.
Written in the BE contract:
“32. Termination (either party): This agreement may be terminated immediately by either party in the event that the other party breaches this Agreement and the breach is not rectified within 28 days of the first party to remedy the same.”
So in 28 days it’s all over???
No paying $495 per month for nothing?
Michael that is your BXP agreement. Your equipment rental is separate. Mark
I feel sorry for the staff that have been laid off due to poor management of what should have been a very profitable company
Mark, The equipment rental agreement has “Bill Express Ltd ABN 123456789” at the top of it.
This still ties part of the rental mob with BE???
I feel sorry for agents who will lose massive amounts of money with no phone recharge and Oz at 30m and Pwbl at 20m. Luckily we found alternatives 2 mths ago.
what alternatives George?
ha ha the wicked witch is dead
can someone more learned than I please tell me where that leaves our contracts, are they now null and void or are the administrators going to come at us for the balance of the lease….. to pay off there debts.
Adam, I’m not a lawyer but I’d expect the BXP contract to ultimately die. The rental agreement is a separate contract. You’d want the Class Action to get up and challenge these contracts. Mark
The rental agreement has things along the line of us requesting BE on behalf of Mobius to debit our accounts.
If there is not BE any more this agreement becomes very shakey. We HAD to sign the rental agreement to have BE in our stores.
Do we now cancel the direct debit for which BE used to collect funds and until recently pay the $495 rental?
Why are we renting these machines for now? There is no BE anymore, unfair contracts don’t go down well with courts these days.
I think the Equipment rental company won’t have a leg to stand on soon.
A good time and place to say thanks to Tower! We have Ezi Pass and Integrated EFTPOS working in the store today. Customers are still being served, the world still rotates and BXP can go forth and get its just rewards.
Thanks Tower!
i stopped my direst debit 2 months ago, if they want their money they can come chasing it and good luck to them. see how they go taking every indivdual newsagency thru the court to recover the rent on a now defunct system. long live ezipass and st george bank i am able to carry on with out too many issues and i get a lot more free counter space to boot.
For those who dont know. Ya can use the little BXP screen on as your computer screen just plug it in presto, bigger screen. As far as the big screen goes, its a bit too big as a computer screen, but wack a set top box on it and it makes a good TV. Ya might as well get something from them.
gino in the words of jack gibson,it is actually, ding dong the witch is dead!!
what about the next brain wave???? b pay anyone???
B pay would be nice
sorry john ,but i thought i might
offend the newsagents for being so rapped up in billexpress . what dings
What a disaster for this to happen to Bill Express.
The concept was great, I think a lot more could have been done with the 32″ screens by way of Town advertising, Regional Tourism advertising, I believe a lot of revenue opportunity has been lost with todays events at bill express.
The dial time terminal with all the phone cards and bill payment options saved having a lot of different suppliers.
May be newsagents should have done a lot more in-house promo to help themselves make money and sell the Bill express concept we certainly did in our small country business.
How stupid and greedy for ANF to approve and oversee the contract with BXP then? ANF could sell the whole newsagent industry for merely $200,000 fee benefiting from BXP annually. Now newsagents are paying nearly 2 million dollars a month for the bloody contract they stucked in. Only the class action in court would decide their fate.
John, I certainly did everything by the book with the whole BE,Phonecard, Bopo, Giftcard(BlackHawk) and I was sent a letter to say that because of underperforming newsagents I was to have the subsidy removed etc.
Bill Express screwed themselves, Newsagents did nothing to them in comparison.
It is sad that something like this can happen these days. They’ll get what they deserve.
Samuel, from what I can see there are chinks in the contract.
I’ll share what I find with everyone when I find it.
Michael i did the same thing they told me to wait one more week and presto they close up shop
Also being a small country newsagent, I too tried to make the best of a bad situation. But was up for 544.50 per month for equipment hire from CHP (BE) there is no way our sales and commision can cover this. Im very happy BE has one belly up and wait with bated breath for the class action. This morning I disconnected all BE equipment and have made alternative arrangments. On another note ANF can go belly up to as far Im concerned as well. Bill Express rep was a women called Trish Hunt and she now works for ANF. ANF has shown a complete disregard for Newsagencys and I for one will no longer even consider a membership with ANF.
The big screen does make a great TV, we will al be able to show the Olympics live from the 8th August
peter, as a former BE employee, (i left in 05 when it became obvious that i could not in good faith continue to represent them) i think it harsh to ‘out’ the former employee as you did. i cannot speak for that particular person’s situation, but i can assure you most of the people i worked with who were dealing with newsagents directly did so with no awareness whatever of what was happening higher up the ladder. further, some of us left other employment to take up positions with BE. like you, we were sold on the concept and ultimately left out to dry.
my association with BE damaged my professional reputation, wasted a year of my professional life, and even 3 years on, makes it embarrassing for me to go into a newsagency. and the reality is that those employees not so fortunate as myself to leave early on in the piece, might now be looking at months of unemployment. they too are victims in this fiasco.
Jacinto, it was more of a go at ANF than a former employee, but saying that Trish gave a very hard sell, even threatned to put this concept into another business in town who wasnt a newsagent if I didnt come on board with this “new beaut scheme”. ‘Subsidy would last the entire agreement etc etc. She also called herself the NSW state manager. So sorry if it seems harsh, but outing her is the least she deserves.
we had a similar experience in that they will offer BillExp to someone next door (non-newsagent) if we do not take it up.
you can call us naive but we definitely would not be taken so easily next time someone makes this comment.
Jacinto; genuinely sorry to hear about your damaged professional reputation through your BXP associaion…I won’t name & shame the BXP rep who aggressively sold the flawed BXP concept to us with those immortal words (“You Will Never Be Out Of Pocket !!) …here is your opportunity for ex-BXP employees/sales reps (or in your words Victims) to go on record and verify/substantiate to all of us newsagents’ (and the ACCC) those misleading & false assurances that were promised to us about rebates etc…may you never be out of pocket !
peter, i accept what you say and understand why you would say it. while there is no excuse for strong arming people like that, in some cases billers would not come on board unless BE outlets were located in specific postcodes. in those instances the reality that a nearby business would get the BE terminal wasn’t only a threat: it was a necessary fact. further, some BE representatives were not employees as such but were contractors running their own businesses so the issue of job titles and status within BE does get muddied.
the point i am making is that just as newsagents unfairly took flak from disgruntled customers as tho newsagents were responsible for the failings of the enterprise, some newsagents seem to want to move this flak to the employees of BE they can put a name and a face to. in most cases, and i grant there will be exceptions, this would be unfair.
while that might make one feel better, it gets you no closer to understanding who was responsible for it all.
mark. i was not involved in selling BE altho i am well familiar with the promises that were made. any information i have on that score would be hearsay.
even years after leaving BE i still cannot be satisfied in my own mind whether the stuff that came from above was a deliberate fraud or whether those people actually believed the pitch and simply had to alter their positions over time to accommodate failed expectations. it is possible that even at senior levels in the enterprise some people might have fallen into one box and some into others.
i simply don’t know. what i do know is i was told things that were later shown to be substantially incorrect and that i, in good faith, relayed this to newsagents. once it started to appear to me to be pattern of ‘contradiction’ i could no longer do so, and resigned.
it is my uncertainty about how this all happened that has me following these recent events. like you guys, i want to know who knew what, and when. because i can assure you, it wasn’t most of us guys on the ground.
Newsagents already paid few months’ ‘rental’ fees, what about those fees we’ve already paid to so call leasing comany? Now BXP is bankrupted, I don’t think newsagents could get their money back even we win in the court. The best outcome for us is the judge said the lease contract could be terminated without any consequences because it was sold in misleading and deceptive way.
Samuel, BXP is not bankrupted, just in administration. Mark
I think naming and shaming is a waste of time. Trish Hunt signed me up and even though she said the same to me i.e. “if you don’t sign up I will try someone else”. I am a businessman and I realised that if I did not take it, then it would be placed somewhere else.
Individuals are not to blame it’s the Bill Express board who had a great concept however did not have the right people at the top to execute it.
Good luck to any ex employee of Bill Express, I for one have cancelled my direct debt and will happily have my day in court.