The
Challenge
While studying trends in the consumer financial market, Technossus developers realized there was no easy way for consumers to track recurring monthly subscription payments. The number of subscription services proliferated with the growth of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. It became common for consumers to have several subscriptions, including entertainment services such as Netflix and Hulu, online tools such as QuickBooks or Salesforce.com, or informational subscriptions such as online reporting services, newspapers, and magazines.
The problem of managing these subscriptions was growing as more companies, including industry giants such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple, were putting considerable effort into moving their customers into monthly subscription payments vs. larger one-time payments for licenses. Consumers were happy to go this route but needed an advocate to help them through this change in how they pay for products & services from software companies.
No tool existed that allowed consumers to track and manage all of these various monthly payments, which could easily result in consumers paying for services they didn’t need or inadvertently losing a service they did need. Subscribing, canceling, upgrading, or making any other change to subscriptions had to be done at a separate website for each service. This problem was particularly onerous if a customer wanted to change their payment method for all their subscriptions, as many people do when they lose a credit card or change banks.
Technossus decided to solve this problem and create a tool that empowered consumers to efficiently and proactively manage these services, with only 24 hours to do so.
The
Solution
One of Technossus’ strengths is its ability to see a problem from the customer’s perspective, which it displayed in its first step by examining and validating the customer’s need.
Despite the time constraints, they also put considerable effort into evaluating related customer problems, such as credit card fraud or payment problems, and envisioning how a single application could be used to solve them all. They built a web platform and application with a suite of features that allowed consumers to manage all their monthly subscriptions in one application. A customer merely needed to give the application permission to access their bank records and, thanks to a creative bit of development work, the program would automatically determine what recurring subscription payments the customer was making and add these to the application.
The customer could then see a consolidated monthly budget for their subscriptions, look at their monthly payments by category, make global payment changes, or manage their individual subscriptions. The solution also included a subscription marketplace where consumers could shop for new subscription services by category and enroll in the new services with one click. In addition to all these features, the Technossus team also included a function that alerted a customer if there was suspicious activity in their account.
The team worked non-stop and succeeded in building an entire working demo of the product in less than 24 hours. The final solution included integrations with financial services, banks, PayPal, and an application that detects fraudulent activity.
When a working prototype of the new product was introduced to members of the FinTech community, it received immediate accolades, and several banks and FinTech companies expressed interest in incorporating the product into their service offerings. Members of the FinTech community were amazed that the Technossus team was able to complete the entire product development cycle for a moderately complex product in just 24 hours. For the Technossus team, it was particularly gratifying to receive recognition for their ability to identify unmet customer needs and build an innovative, original solution with features and functions that were entirely new to the market.
