Biller Genie CEO eyes blockchain-powered invoicing

Biller Genie CEO Thomas Aronica views cryptocurrency as an inevitable evolution of financial rails that his company will eventually need to support.

While the B2B SaaS platform has yet to integrate crypto, Aronica told me in a recent Q&A that stablecoins like USDC could soon enable real-time settlements for payroll, commissions, and supplier payments. Longer term, he envisions blockchain reshaping invoicing itself by replacing, say, email trails with distributed ledgers that give every party instant visibility—a shift he believes will arrive as adoption and regulation catch up to the technology’s potential.

The following interview has been edited for clarity.

What impact has cryptocurrency had on Biller Genie?

Aronica: We’ve explored integrations and there’s definitely a path forward. In the future, we’ll likely support real-time crypto payments with settlement to fiat. Starting with something like USDC, which continues to grow in adoption, opens opportunities not just for buyer–supplier payments, but also for things like commissions and payroll to be remitted in crypto.

Beyond payments, I think blockchain itself has enormous potential. If you separate crypto as a payment rail from blockchain as a technology, you can imagine a world where all invoices live on a blockchain. Instead of emailing PDFs back and forth and worrying about version control, everyone would share the same distributed ledger with real-time visibility. That’s a future I believe is very possible.

It seems, though, that cryptocurrency is exerting considerable influence on federal policy for an industry with so little utility. When was the last time anybody ordered a pizza using crypto?

Aronica: It comes back to necessity driving invention. If you look at other regions, like Asia-Pacific or the EU, contactless pay at restaurants—where they bring the machine to the table—has been around for 15 years. We only got it here during COVID because people didn’t want to touch anything. It’s the same with Apple Pay. Just three or four years ago, it wasn’t everywhere in the U.S. because consumers weren’t using it, and merchants didn’t want to spend the money to upgrade.

Doesn’t volatility impede utility?

Aronica: I think there’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Business owners, software providers, and even us haven’t invested fully in building the rails for crypto payments because adoption is still cautious. But when I ask people if they’d use it, the answer is usually yes.

There are ways to address volatility. Stablecoins remove that concern entirely, and even with volatile coins like Bitcoin (BTC) or XRP (XRP), you can create offboarding ramps that settle transactions in cash in real time. That eliminates the risk for the businesses receiving payment.

For me, it’s less about the technology and more about prioritizing the 25 things people are asking us to build. There’s definitely a place for crypto, and the increasing legislation and regulatory attention reflect growing adoption. We’re still very early in what this looks like as a form of payment, but solutions exist today to handle volatility—there’s a whole world emerging around exchanging and repatriating these assets.

Are Biller Genie’s customers asking for crypto?

Aronica: We definitely hear about it—from both distribution partners and users—but it’s opportunistic. We’re not actively surveying for it, and right now, it’s not enough of a priority to focus on. There’s a flood of opportunities we have to prioritize, and crypto is just one of many. If you think about payments in general, when I got into this business, we were trying to get restaurants to move from cash to card. For the last 15 years, it’s mostly been card versus card—a race to the bottom.

Now, we’re entering a new phase: card versus other rails, including crypto. We’re not trying to convince businesses that already accept crypto to use us. There are tens of thousands of credit card and electronic payment providers, so even if one or two competitors offer crypto rails, it’s not overwhelming. We’re not racing to be the first mover; we’re focused on helping educate the market. Right now, there’s still a lot of education that needs to happen before the space becomes highly competitive.

What keeps you up at night in terms of red flags or stress points?

Aronica: The main stress is meeting demand. We’ve built a powerful solution that people like and that helps them, but I constantly worry that we can’t help enough people fast enough. The challenge is scaling to meet market demand so we can do something truly special. Anything less would feel like falling short of our execution goals. Our focus now is on continuing what we’re doing, doing it really well, and making sure we’re making people happy in the process.