Marci Lobel-Esrig of SilverBills
AgeTech Collaborative™ participant SilverBills is a concierge bill management service dedicated to making paying bills on time easy and safe — a challenge that can disproportionately affect busy or aging adults.
We wanted you to learn more about what SilverBills does and how they do it, so we spent time talking with Marci Lobel-Esrig, the Founder, CEO and General Counsel, and Lisa Rosenblum, the Director of Sales.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
ATC: Would you introduce yourselves, and give us a quick description of your company?
Marci : I’m Marci Lobel-Esrig. I’m the Founder, CEO and General Counsel of SilverBills. We're a concierge bill management service, providing services throughout the U.S. We scrutinize, store and make sure our clients’ bills are paid correctly and on time. We work with all categories of bills — electric, cell phone, rent, insurance and many others. We have proprietary software that we've developed that allows our account managers to provide our services, and we have a high level of scrutiny of all activities.
Lisa : And I’m Lisa Rosenblum; I’m the Director of Sales at SilverBills. I help enroll clients, then I pair them up with a personal account manager who will work with them going forward.
ATC: What if a client doesn’t have a computer?
Marci: Actually, 90% of our clients don't use computers; it’s our account managers who are using the software. We serve as a bridge for those individuals who don't want to use computers. We provide clients with an unlimited supply of business reply envelopes so they can mail us the bills that they want us to handle. They can also fax bills to us or email us a PDF. We “meet them where they are” in terms of how they transmit the bills to us.
ATC: What was your inspiration for founding SilverBills?
Marci: I've been an attorney for several decades; I worked on the Bernie Madoff scandal and became an expert in financial exploitation. At the same time, my elderly aunt was struggling with this process of managing her household bills. She lived on one coast, her daughters lived on the other, and the whole time they were visiting her during their limited vacation time, they were going through piles and piles of paper. And there was no existing solution to this challenge that provided an age-centric, age-friendly and secure approach. I just knew that there was a better way to accomplish this.
At the same time, I learned that older adults are often ripe for financial exploitation — it’s a $1 billion problem every year in this country. Unfortunately, people who go into older adults’ homes to provide this kind of service — essentially helping them write checks at the kitchen table — often steal from those clients, even personal effects like jewelry. So I created SilverBills to provide a tech-enabled, highly secure, trustworthy bill management service.
ATC: Your service is intended for people of all ages. Of course, the AgeTech Collaborative™ has a special interest in how SilverBills intersects with people who are 50-plus. What’s been your biggest challenge in reaching that audience in particular?
Marci: Marketing requires a unique approach, not only for the 50-plus demographic, but for the type of service we’re providing. In the startup world, which we’re a part of, the usual approach to marketing is digital marketing. But we’re analogous to a professional service, like an accountant — and people looking to hire an accountant don’t always Google “best accountants”; they ask friends and family for recommendations. So I think we’ve had a marketing challenge more than anything else.
ATC: How do you locate and hire your personal account managers?
Marci: We have a robust vetting process; we do criminal background and fingerprint checks. Typically, they’re people who are motivated by helping others to age in place successfully, and they get a lot of satisfaction out of it. We also have a significant training process, and all activities of our account managers are audited.
Lisa: The account managers work with the same clients month over month, so the clients form a real relationship with their account manager. Our account managers are also helping with the problem of social isolation. A lot of seniors don't have the opportunity to socialize frequently. And sometimes our account managers get a call from their clients just to kind of check in and talk to the account managers.
A few weeks ago I was talking to a client who doesn't have any children, and she doesn't have a surviving spouse. She called herself an “elder orphan.” Just being able to talk to me — plus knowing that if she were ever to have to go into the hospital, her account manager would make sure that her electricity didn’t get turned off while she’s there — meant so much to her.
Marci: We also had a client whom the account manager couldn't reach for a few days. We have a process in place for calling the local police precinct and asking them to do a non-emergency check. So the police went to make sure everything was okay, and everything was okay. But the client was so grateful that someone was checking on them.
ATC: You recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging to provide SilverBills free for one year for certain people, as part of a study. Can you describe what that’s about?
Marci: We received a $2 million grant from the NIH/NIA in recognition of the critical function that household bill management serves for families. The study is specifically earmarked for caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients, typically their adult children. We’ve worked with the AARP Family Caregivers Discussion Group on Facebook, which has provided us with a great opportunity to enroll caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients who are part of that community. Our research partner, the Knoebel Institute for Healthy Aging at the University of Denver, is studying the efficacy of our solution to see whether it's actually accomplishing the goal of alleviating caregiver stress.
Lisa: Our goal is to enroll 150 caregivers to receive SilverBills’ services to help them with the stress of what they’re already doing as a caregiver. As part of the study, there’s a questionnaire to fill out before enrolling, and another one to fill out after receiving our service for six months. The questionnaire takes about 15 minutes.
Any final thoughts?
We are honored and excited to be on this journey to help older adults age in place safely by helping them manage their household bills. And we're thrilled to be part of AARP's AgeTech Collaborative™.
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