Atlanta Spotlight | Jardon Bouska

By Staff Writer Atlanta Trend

• Jan 01, 2014

Years before JardonBouska became head of the Electronic Biller Services Division at Fiserv, he presented his first major bill to himself.

“When it came time to pay for my college, I told my parents, ‘No, I’m going to pay for myself,’ and I did,” says Bouska, who has three siblings, including a twin brother.

He started working at 16 at a hamburger chain and was an assistant manager during college. Paying his way through the University of Kansas, Bouska worked 30-plus hours a week. He would sometimes man the 5 a.m. shift or clock in after classes and stay until 1 a.m.

“Back then, college was much more affordable than it is now,” says Bouska, who has two children in college and two in high school. “It was possible to actually earn money in fast food restaurants and pay your way through college. Today that wouldn’t work.”

Bouska’s independent streak continued in graduate school at Kansas. Initially on track to earn both an MBA and a law degree, he decided to drop the J.D.

“The path there would have been to graduate and go into my dad’s law firm and become a partner and stay in one field and one state forever,” says Bouska, whose father was a prominent district attorney and judge while his mother was a respected social worker. “And I chose not to do that. I wanted to do it myself. I didn’t want it handed to me.”

Bouska went to work as a financial analyst for a small Kansas City-based technology company called Uninet, which through a series of mergers became Sprint. The X.25 package switching company was a predecessor to the Internet.

Thirty years later, online and digital initiatives are a major component of Bouska’s work.  Since 2005, he has been Division President/Executive Vice President and General Manager of Electronic Biller Services at first CheckFree Corporation and then Fiserv, which acquired CheckFree in 2007.

Fiserv is a world leader in information management and e-commerce systems for the financial services industry, with more than 20 billion digital payment transactions managed in 2012; 10 million mobile banking users; 14,500 clients in 80 countries; and 70 million people using its online banking solutions.

Bouska’s Biller Solutions Division accounts for one-tenth of Fiserv’s business.

Most of Bouska’s customers are utilities, telecommunications, cable and insurance companies across the United States. The company moves more than a trillion dollars every year for customers making transactions.

Fiserv is No. 1 in account processing and electronic bill payment solutions, including the biller direct market. Fiserv has 94 percent market share, supporting the delivery of 10 billion data-fed eBills annually. Among consumers, 24 million active bill payment users make 1.5 billion transactions annually. There are also 26,000 walk-in payment locations, such as major supermarkets, where consumers can even pay with cash.

“Our motto is wherever a consumer wants to pay, we’ll help enable that,” Bouska says.

A new product, Biller Advantage, lets small-to mid-sized billers (2,000-250,000 bills a month) take advantage of the payment capability previously enjoyed only by large billers. The companies can accept credit cards or present eBills not only at their own websites, but also at bank front ends. Fiserv sees a $1.5 billion opportunity in expanding the eBill network to mid-market billers, whose 4.2 billion bills are currently 85 percent paper.

“The more regulations increase around what can and can’t be done,” Bouska says, “the harder it is for companies, particularly those medium-sized and smaller, to be able to do this on their own without getting in trouble or spending way too much money on compliance. So the trend toward outsourcing is increasing.”

Fiserv, which has had 27 consecutive years of double digit EPS growth, continues to seek new ways to expand its reach. It is also encouraging adoption of electronic payments by new consumers and increased usage among those who already pay eBills.

Fiserv recently introduced Snap to Pay, which allows consumers to take a picture of a bill for payment instead of entering information or setting up an eBill.

“Everything’s moving toward mobility,” Bouska says.

Although more than 20 percent of bills are viewed on a tablet or a mobile phone today, Bouska says there is plenty of room to grow in terms of adoption.

Consumers who use some electronic payment products could expand their usage to other bills they pay regularly. “There’s a long runway between where we are and where we could be,” Bouska says. “If we can increase the adoption rate just 1 percent, that’s $15 million more in revenue for us.”

He says increased adoption will happen naturally with the generation shift. “The younger generation is all electronic,” Bouska says. “In most cases, they don’t even know what a checkbook is.”

The new frontiers in his field are international -- for Fiserv as a whole and the Biller Solutions Division in particular – and much closer to home. Bouska says that wearables, such as Google Glass, could eventually be used to pay bills.

“In its simplest form, you get a message on your phone that says, ‘It’s time to pay your utility bill, text to say ‘yes,’ because they already have your information,” Bouska says. “It’s that sort of idea taken to other devices and other mechanisms.”

In his ideal world, no bills would be delivered to mailboxes. “Your payment is safer electronically than it is in your mailbox,” Bouska says, citing expert reports. “More things are stolen out of mailboxes than ever get pilfered electronically -- on a percentage basis.”

Bouska says security is a No. 1 priority across the board for Fiserv, which has about $4.4 billion in revenue annually and 21,000 employees.

“We invest a lot of money and do a great job of making sure that everything we do is safe and secure,” he says.

Bouska manages a team of about 800 in the Biller Solutions Division. He sets goals and leads by example.

 “The hardest thing for employees is not being able to do their job well because they have too many obstacles in the way to make progress and meet their goals,” Bouska says. “So my job is to help them eliminate those things.”

Although Bouska has worked for only four companies in his business career, he’s had many jobs. At MCI WorldCom alone, where Bouska worked from 1987-2000, he filled 27 different roles.

By changing jobs every six months or so, Bouska would find himself depending on people he had worked with three jobs earlier.  “If you’re not treating people right and giving them the opportunity to excel, or giving them feedback about what may or may not need to be improved, you don’t have as much cooperation down the road,” he says.

Bouska embraced his cavalcade of jobs, moving from finance to business development to sales coordination to marketing. He ran a call center, and then all of the MCI call centers.

“It was something new to learn, new people to meet, new challenges to overcome,” he says.

During his last seven years with MCI, he ran two different businesses and also made the move from Sacramento to Atlanta in 1995.

MCI was an $800 million company when Bouska joined, and had grown to a $40 billion giant by the time he left to try his hand at a startup company during the Internet boom.

Bouska was co-founder and then president and Chief Operating Officer of SecureWorks, Inc., which managed intrusion detection services for mid-sized companies.  Soon after the burst of the Internet bubble, Bouska left for CheckFree.

His job was to make CheckFree profitable, and he accomplished that goal within a couple of years.

“Our operations were spread all over, so we decided to close some operations,” Bouska says. “Mainly, though, it was just simplifying the processes.”

He also brought in new technology to help achieve improved results.

For example, Bouska decreased the average touch points internally to satisfy a customer issue from 7.1 to 1.4.

When he arrived, there were 1,200 people in operations. Five years later, that number was reduced, yet CheckFree had five times the revenue and a rapidly growing customer base.

Bouska was interim CIO for a year, “another new thing to learn,” then took over the Biller Division.

He has no regrets about the one job he dodged, becoming a lawyer. “Not one,” Bouska says with a laugh. “If I was talking to anybody about jobs, I’d say you have to enjoy what you do or you’re not going to be good at it. In fact, you’re going to hate it.

“I enjoy what I do. I like to come in every day and it’s fun. I couldn’t see it any other way. If it stopped being fun, I’d have to look for something else.”