Did you know that one in five subscribers cancel via their banks, resulting in a surge in payment blocks and indirect cancellations for subscription companies? Why? Consumers want a one-stop shop to manage their finances, including their subscriptions. The surge of action-enabled financial management means that subscribers now want to cancel their subscriptions and memberships indirectly through their banks, rather than directly through your business, the subscription provider.
Learn how subscription companies need to navigate this new world of subscriber-to-bank cancellations! Leading subscription and fintech expert, Erica Katsambis, VP at Minna Technologies, will talk you through the data and impact of bank cancellations by your subscribers. She has a deep understanding of why banking apps are so trusted by your subscribers and have more touchpoints with your subscribers than you are tracking. Erica will show how to engage and retain subscribers, while recovering and growing recurring revenue, in-directly, through banking apps.
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About Our Experts
Erica Katsambis, VP of Sales, Partnerships & Solutions – supporting Subscription-based Businesses, Minna Technologies
Erica is VP Sales, Partnerships & Solutions at Minna Technologies and on a mission to create a problem-free subscription economy for any business with a subscription business model. In this role, she is responsible for Minna’s merchant community, connecting them to the wider banking and fintech app community, and adding a sales channel for which merchants can retain, acquire, and grown their customer base. Prior to joining, she led the Strategic Partnership efforts at PayPal, where she introduced a global, closed-loop incentive platform to millions of consumers to accelerate subscription revenue, including work with Spotify and Google. Prior to that she spent over 5 years at Three Mobile Group where she led the strategy and implementation of subscription management capabilities through a global cloud- to-cloud based platform. Three Mobile Group’s platform supported 8 mobile networks and served mobile consumers to digitally bundle their tariff plans. In this role, she partnered with Netflix, Microsoft, PlayStation, Epic Games, Spotify, and Google and during her tenure, the platform was a first-mover in making Amazon membership services available through a telco channel.
Transcript
Kathy: Welcome everybody. Welcome to Subscription Insiders webinar, How to Engage Subscribers via Their Banks. I have leading subscription and finance technology expert with us Erica Katsambis from Minna Technologies to join us today. So welcome, Erica.
Erica: Thank you.
Kathy: So did you know that one in five subscribers cancel their banks via their banks and it results in a surge of payment blocks and indirect cancellations? Why? Because consumers want a one-stop shop to manage their finances, including subscriptions. Your subscribers want to do this. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, what the trends are, what your subscribers are doing, and how you and your business need to be thinking about this channel for managing those cancellations as well as engaging and upselling and cross-selling via the banking apps. So let’s get started. If you could advance, Erica. Thank you.
This webinar is a webinar hosted by Subscription Insider and it’s one of the many webinars that we host. My goal, Subscription Insider team’s goal, is to support you with information and provide insight to help you grow a profitable business. And this is one of the many, many programs that we offer, as I mentioned. And coming up is Subscription Show 2022. If you could advance, please. We are hosting in three short weeks, Subscription Show, November 9 and 10. I will be in New York and we’re also hosting via live stream. We also have some pre-conference boot camps we are hosting on November 8th.
To give you a taste of some of the things we’ll be covering, we in our grand keynote stage have Nicholas Thompson who’s going to be talking about what’s coming up, what we need to prepare for, and how to thrive through change. We’re going to be talking about monetization shifts, the state of the subscription industry with some breaking research that we’ll be presenting, the keys to success and scalable subscriptions, understanding the M&A market today and what you need to prepare for, and how that’s changed. And just announced right now today Adobe will be presenting, for the first time, the secret behind Adobe’s continued recurring success. So I’m really excited Matt’s going to be getting up on stage as our closing keynote for Subscription Show. You can see the track keynotes there. We have a strategy track, a marketing track, and a payment track, to help you really dig into the details outside of the keynotes to help you manage and grow your business.
And finally, one last thing about Subscription Show. We are offering pre-conference boot camps. You can see, it will be on the fundamentals of subscription regulation, the fundamentals of direct-to-consumer operations, powering your payments, and subscriber retention. Every single teacher in these three-hour boot camps on November 8th are leading experts in each of those topics. And you can see on the other side of your screen some of the sessions that we’ll be covering. So I encourage you all, if you have not already, go to subscriptionshow.com to check it all out. So with that, let’s get started. Erica, I’m going to hand the microphone virtually over to you, to really dive into all the data and information and learning for today.
Erica: Thank you very much, Kathy. Thank you for the invite today. And hi, everyone. I’m really happy to be able to get the opportunity to share the work that Minna is doing in this space and the insights that we have that we’re going to share with you. Minna is a Swedish FinTech and we’re leading in subscription management, specifically in banking apps. It’s quite a specific area and we’ve got quite a unique perspective in this space. We’re actually a facilitator, so we facilitate between subscription businesses on one side and banks on the other. And it’s our infrastructure in between and our API integrations that bring these two parties together. Also, I do work for a Swedish company and I’ve got a Swedish first name, but I’m actually half English and half Greek Cypriot, which is where that surname comes from.
So we have been establishing relationships with banks since 2016 and we’ve built trusted relationships with many banks and there’s a handful on here that you can see. One is Lloyd’s, which is a large banking group in the UK, but we also have a strategic partnership with Visa who are also our investor. We have live operations now in the EU, where this all started in Scandinavia, but also in UK and the US. And we have over 20 million consumers now and that’s growing by the day.
So consumer behavior has changed and banking behavior has changed and there’s a number of moving parts and it’s become a bit of a melting pot. And it’s at this intersection that there’s quite a lot of friction being created in the subscription economy, but that actually presents an opportunity and one that we think that we can all solve for together.
It’s been impossible actually to ignore. There’s been this surge of cancellations in the market at the moment. I think everyone will have heard about Netflix. They had about 1.2 million cancellations in Q1 of this year. And it does sound like it’s doom and gloom, but we want to bring to you today that it’s not. And actually, I noticed, Kathy, you posted yesterday the Q3 results of Netflix, and they’ve bounced right back. And when you look at the trends that we have been seeing, we expected that. So right now, we actually think you could retain more consumers. It’s actually one in five consumers that cancel via a bank. And we’re actually, Minna have been involved in over 2 million cancellations with Lloyd’s in the UK over the last year or so.
So why is that important? What’s important is that these cancellations are not true cancellations. These cancellations actually result in a block on a bank card. And that’s important because it is for consumer protection. It protects against any wrongful charges and it’s something that banks can decide upon themselves.
What’s interesting about that is that these blocks are for around 13 months, but they do vary by country and they happen in regulated markets such as UK, US and also actually Australia. Some of these blocks can be in excess of 13 months, much, much more. And it’s that duration that actually is proving to create a bit of friction when you start to look at the new emerging behavioral patterns of consumers using subscriptions.
So here’s just a quick illustration and this is taking a streaming business in the UK. Don’t make any assumptions about who this is, but it’s just to demonstrate how a subscription loss and revenue could be hitting your bottom line. If you look at today, there would’ve been from a streaming business, approximately 1000 attempted cancellations via a bank. So, that actually equates to over 1000 blocked bank cards. If you think about those cancellations and take them from now until the end of the year, that’s actually 85,000. And when you take an annual view, it’s 400,000, which is huge. Obviously, this is a streaming business, your figures might be less than this, but even if there are a fraction of this, this is still large volumes.
So the takeaway from this is that cancellations via a bank are actually blocked bank cards, not true cancellations and that’s not a great experience for any consumer. So why all these cancellations in the first place? And there’s a few different components that has driven this. One of them has been the pandemic and the pandemic actually accelerated the adoption of subscription services in many physical and digital services as we all try to survive basically in the pandemic in the four walls of our house to keep ourselves entertained, buying productivity tools, fitness, wellness, even kids education apps.
But actually now, as we come out of the pandemic, we are actually doing a little bit of a decluttering. Do we really need all these subscriptions? And there’s been a bit of a shift to the types of subscriptions that we might need. Also, we’re unfortunately entering into a recession and we’re entering into this cost of living crisis and inflation rates are at nearly an all time high of 40 years. So this is the other point that’s accelerated the activity in this space. Also, consumers are actually starting to shift and to cut back and tighten their belts on luxury items, entertainment, holiday, subscriptions will be part of that.
But what’s interesting to see, that half of consumers are actually spending more on subscriptions than ever before and that’s the component that we’ll get into now. Why is that? Well, not all cancellations are the same. Some are a genuine desire to cancel. Some are consumers wanting to end a service, they no longer want it. But some are actually just the means of wanting to have choice or flexibility or transparency on spend personalization instead. And so there’s other reasons that consumers are canceling, other than actually severing ties. So this isn’t necessarily about disengagement from services, this isn’t necessarily unhappy customers that are canceling.
Subscribers are actually demanding more from their service and from their subscription management. And what we can see is three emerging personas within the subscription economy. So I wanted to introduce you to the savvy snackers, the super switchers and the remorseful. And I call these the power users, but they’ve all got something in common and that’s this characteristic of what we call in Minna, the churn and return effect. So these guys know that a continuous payment authority is something that you can cancel at any time. They are aware of that now and that’s what I’m going to take you through in a little bit more detail.
So cue the savvy snackers. So the savvy snackers are exactly that. They’re savvy and they’re money conscious, but they’re also actually incredibly loyal. And we see the savvy snackers emerging where there are subscription services that have high peaks and troughs and seasonality, or where there’re as short-lived content that’s consumable, that has a lifespan. So take Dave and Claire for example. Dave is sports-mad, he’s a football fanatic and he signs up to a football streaming service. He signs up at the beginning of a football season, but by the end of the football season, he has canceled. Cue three months’ time, he’s resubscribed again.
So he’s just aware and money conscious and knows that he doesn’t have to have that subscription service running all the time. We actually see 25% of consumers looking to return and 75% of those do so with the same bank card, the same bank card that is blocked for 13 months, which makes it very difficult for them to return. But the key thing here is that 80% of them are actually returning within a very short window of three months. So this is where that churn and the return comes in and that kind of frenzy of activity. What we also know is that 80% would prefer to pause in a bank app, rather than cancel.
Kathy: Erica, there’s a question that I see in the chat that I think a number of people have. It’s about educating us on what a block is. So why is that so important and if somebody’s trying to cancel and it’s blocked. So if you can educate us on that, I think that would be helpful.
Erica: Yeah, of course. So the blocks are placed as a means of consumer protection and both Visa and MasterCard offer services in this space to banks to help them manage consumer protection and those that are financially vulnerable. But it is a very stringent measure. And the banks can choose how to apply this block and so that they can also choose the duration of these blocks. But the block means that the cancellation is actually not happening. So the service itself isn’t canceled, it’s just the blocked bank card that has happened. Which means that consumer, and this is quite important, cannot not resubscribe to the service unless what tends to happen is they go to their subscription service and their subscription service says we can’t help you, go to your bank. And then the consumer goes to their bank, which likely results in somebody spending an afternoon or a phone call, certainly to a bank to unblock it.
Also, what’s important to call out, say there is a subscription business is that has multiple services or that does a subscription services and one time payments. When that block is applied, it can actually block all of those different things. So it’s a very kind of rigid block in that way. Does that help?
Kathy: Yes, it does. I see some really interesting follow up questions, but let’s save those really good questions, keep them coming everybody until we get through all of this because we get all great stats for everybody.
Erica: Brilliant, wonderful. So second, we have the super switchers. And the super switchers really came to life and emerged out of the pandemic. I think I was one of them, but many people as we said, were taking up more and more services. So these guys love exploring, they’re the early adopters, they love trying new services, but they’re not actually that loyal, necessarily. So for example, a super switcher would’ve taken up in the pandemic, perhaps Discovery Plus, Disney Plus, Amazon. They may have got to the end of the season of Mad Men and decided that they didn’t want to watch anything else with Amazon, but they’d had a recommendation from a friend for Sandman, that’s a Netflix original. And so what they did, they did a trade off. So they canceled Amazon and they switched across to Netflix. So they’re hopping from service to service and this is really as a result of this particular vertical, has also become highly competitive with lots of new services being rolled out across the US and Europe in the last year.
76% of consumers say they will continue current levels of content consumption. So this also highlights that this isn’t a reduction, these cancellations aren’t reduction in engagement, not at all. They’re still continuing to engage just as much. 80% actually say that they would prefer to change their plan, rather than cancel in a bank app. So they’d actually prefer maybe to move down to a free plan, rather than cancel instead.
So finally we have the remorseful and the remorseful, well they’re angry. They’re angry. And they tend to be also very money conscious, but they’re responding to price hikes in the market. So for example, Adrian has got to the end of Mad Men, sorry, halfway through Mad Men is really enjoying it, but he’s, he hears of a price hike. Gets to Friday, he’s sitting down with his takeaway, he’s tired, he wants to watch the rest of Mad Men. But actually when he tries to do so he remembers he’s canceled and the cancellation results in a conversation to his provider and then also to the bank. And then he spends his evening on the phone to the bank unblocking the card, which is not how you want to spend your Friday evening.
But what we see in our data, is that even at the announcement of a price increase, 38% increase, month on month takes effect. And when a price increase does happen, month on month, we see a 57% increase. So it’s really quite significant. But actually we can see that 86% of consumers would’ve actually preferred to take up a discounted offer in a bank app, rather than cancel.
So it’d be interesting to see if you recognize yourself amongst these three personas and also if you recognize these in your own subscription service insights.
Kathy: Yeah, I’m curious what people think. I’m going to open up a poll here and let us know. So it’s on your screen right now. Do you feel you have savvy snackers, super switchers, the remorseful, all of the above or none of the above? So I’m real curious what you think, which personas are canceling via the banks and using that. So very interesting data so far here. I’m going to keep the poll open, just a few, one minute more. We’ve got about 50% of you so far who’ve voted. I’ll give it just a couple more seconds and then I’m going to close the poll in 3, 2, 1.
Okay, so here’s the result, Erica and everybody here. So the number one coming in at 38% are savvy snackers. I’m curious if that surprises you. Number two is all of the above. Number three is tied with the remorseful and none and nobody apparently has only super switchers. So there you go. That’s what we have the poll. What do you think? Is that what you typically see Erica?
Erica: I would’ve expected super switchers to be higher. It’s such a dominant theme right now, but I think that’s probably covered in the fact that we’ve got a very high response rate to all.
Kathy: To all of the above. Absolutely, absolutely. Well let’s get going. I do have about five of the same question. So I’m going to ask it as we go along, which is about error codes. So when somebody goes to their bank and they’re like, I don’t want this charge, the bank blocks. Are there any error codes that come through that we can see?
Erica: I think there’s about 200 different error codes, 200 different reasons. The banks will definitely have access to that and working in partnership with them. Certainly if a subscription business is working with us and on our infrastructure, we have access, in collaboration and in a partnership with banks, to see some of that data. But essentially our focus is very much on the subscription part of this. But yes, they have visibility of it and on occasions we work on specific topics to understand more. So yes, there’s an opportunity to understand that.
Okay. So subscribers essentially want flexibility and omnichannel. So what we are seeing is they actually want choice, they want personalization, they want transparency of their spend, they want personalization and they want omnichannel in terms of being able to cancel whatever means. So yes, absolutely via their brands on website, the brand’s app. But equally if it’s easy for them, they want to do that via banking app as well.
So they want this choice of how they can cancel. And in a way that’s frictionless. And what I’m hearing more and more, which is lovely from subscription businesses, they say there’s no bad cancellation unless it’s been a difficult one and that they actually see a great frictionless cancellation experience as a loyalty tool and one that will drive up NPS and drive consumers back and back into the app to resubscribe. So, that’s really lovely to hear.
So why are we so convinced that this is where all the activity is happening? There’s a few different parts again to this. First of all, the trend of open banking has definitely meant that consumers have built more of an affinity and more of a relationship with personal financial management tools. There is a lot more relevant services out there, the better customer experiences, more innovative. And also there’s this consolidation of a viewpoint on managing your financial wellness.
So it’s bringing everything into the center and bringing it into the banking app. What’s also really lovely to see is that a third of consumers trust their bank more now than they did before COVID. But anybody who hadn’t adopted a banking app really pre-COVID, their hand was absolutely forced because the banks in the retail high street were shut. And whilst people don’t want to spend their time on a phone. So any late adopters, it pushed them over the line to be engaging in a bank app in a much more personal way. And 99% of Gen Zs say that they use a mobile banking app every day and 98% of millennials say the same. So it’s quite an overwhelming majority.
What we can also see is that subscription management is now cited as the top three most wanted feature within a banking app. So it feels like the train has left the station. This is already on a trajectory and now it’s just understanding how can we leverage this in the best way possible and how can we provide the best possible experiences for consumers in managing their subscriptions. So I wasn’t going to talk about the friction and the size of the opportunity without talking a little bit about the solution. So if we go back to that problem, one scenario is consumers call their bank to unblock their bank card and there will be a proportion that still do that, but also some consumers are going into their app and they can block their bank card now. But obviously that results in, typically a 13 month block. And I just wanted to show you what that looks like and then take you into our solution.
So this is, without Minna’s involvement, this is what would typically happen in a bank app. So this is canceling via a bank. So you can see an overview screen here of all the subscriptions and then you can see a specific subscription service, a smart, and you can see the details, the personal details of the user. And they can go in and they can play place what is called the block instruction. So this is what the bank is placing. That block is then placed; they get a response back and then that confirmation of that block is confirmed. What we then wanted to show you is the experience with Minna. And this is through a very simple API integration, which is, I’m pleased to say very light touch. And this can reduce involuntary churn by 20%. I’m just going to take you into that.
Kathy: Yeah, we have to do that. So I think the slide that we were just on, we will come back to at the end. There’s a number of questions about how the block happens, why when somebody cancels, that particular payment card is blocked for 13 months, give or take. And now we can see it and then the code. So let’s address all those questions, really good questions at the end. So we’ll be going back to that slide and here’s your demo. I can see it. Absolutely. So I’m now canceling my card, my subscription here.
Erica: Amazing. Okay.
Kathy: Right.
Erica: So then I go to cancel subscription. What we do here is through the bank, but from the consumer, with their consent, they actually input one to two items of personal details. Usually that’s like an email address or it can be a phone number and that’s to identify the subscription. So as an example here we type in a personal email address and then in this instance for this particular service is a hard or a soft cancellation option. So we go for the hard and we press cancel subscription and that takes effect and that’s real time and that’s about two and a half seconds response to our API to complete a cancellation. And it’s that simple. I’m going to now switch back.
Kathy: So with that, they did not get the bank block.
Erica: Exactly. So it was just a streamlined cancellation, a proper cancellation actually canceling the payment and the service and no block is placed at all.
Kathy: All right. So I know there’s lots of questions and I’m seeing them all. I’ve done some one on one responses to make sure we’ve seen them. You’ll need to not share this and go back to your slides Erica, so people can go back to your slides. Here we go. Self-serve subscription management. Okay, we got it.
Erica: Brilliant. So we haven’t just stopped at [inaudible 00:28:29] cancellations. What we’re looking at is a suite of subscription management features within banking apps. And the idea is that we aren’t reinventing the wheel here. We’re mirroring the features that you would have in your own subscription plan. So if you, and I don’t really need to explain these because we’re all using these now, but we’ve got retention offer, we’ve got change plan and we’ve got pause and resume. If you, for some reason didn’t have pauses and resume, we wouldn’t be putting pause and resume into the banking app. It’s we’re purely mirroring the same experience that a consumer would have in your own channels but within a banking app. And this can actually reduce churn by up to 25%. I’m going to go back into that demo. Okay. Hopefully we have it now.
Kathy: Yep, we do.
Erica: So if we go in to pause and resume, so now we’re in the recent transactions, we can see all the subscriptions. If we go to Shield Insurance as an example and we can see the details and we go to pause. Now here you can see for this subscription service, there’s quite a lot of options in terms of how long you want to pause for. But again, this is just mirroring what a consumer would normally see. So then you would go down to enter your identifier, which is your personal email address, you type that in and the subscription is then paused in real time.
Retention offer. So say we want to cancel Happy Fit. You can see the personal details, but here we have the benefit of being able to capture why that consumer wants to cancel in the first place. Now 30% of people site that it’s too expensive. But the great thing about this is, this is data that you then have access to understand why are consumers canceling and is that different in a banking app than anywhere else.
So then we go to too expensive and we fill in that personal email address again and we go to cancel. And what happens is it’s a cancellation request but the cancellation hasn’t just been made just yet. It serves up an offer. So the consumer can take an offer instead, if they want to. Of course if they don’t want to, we make that really easy for them to cancel and there’s still an option to cancel. If they want to accept, then they can do so and the offer is applied.
And then again with change plan, we have electricity, we go to change plan, this is the options that they would see in the brand zone website. Say they want to reduce that, they want to tighten their belts that month and they want to reduce their costs, they can actually reduce to a lower plan. So we move to the premium plan and we type in the email address again and we can change plan. And again that’s a real time API response that’s happening there.
So what we can then see, we can actually see the impact per feature. So each of these actions we can see that 6% would take up an offer in a bank app rather than cancel and 10% would change plan in a bank app rather than cancel and 10% would pause in a bank app rather than cancel. What we can also see is that consumer lifetime is extended in the region of about five to 12 months for 81% of consumers. It’s quite a large bucket, admittedly five to 12 months. But that’s because we’re working with so many subscription businesses that are in different verticals with different price points, with different seasonality trends that it is it quite a broad range at the moment. But we can delve into specifics separately.
So if we go back to that 400,000 that we spoke about in terms of annualized blocks and blocked bank cards and we look at that a little bit deeper and we look at the impact on your revenue. So on the left hand side you can see that 400,000 annualized blocks again, we know that 20% of consumers are returning with the same bank cards and they return roughly after about three months. So that’s nine months of revenue that you would normally have if there was no blocked bank card. And you times that by the price of the price plan, that’s 7.9 million in resubscription revenue that is lost due to those blocked bank cards, but can be unlocked with a simple API integration.
Also, if you’re thinking about winning back all that 400,000 with a winback campaign, that would cost, well 400,000 times 40 and we’ve heard much higher customer acquisition cross quoted, but just as a rough cut back of the envelope, we’re looking at 16 million in terms of the winback campaign that will be needed to win these consumers back. But also bearing in mind that they would likely have a blocked bank card, they would find it more difficult to return, unless they sorted that out.
Also, if we then look at saving at point of cancellation, so the consumer does not cancel at all. So they take retention, they take a retention offer or change plan or pause. And we take the 400,000 again and we times that by 10.99 and by 12 months we get 52 million loss per year. But then if we think about the 25% that we can hold onto with those additional features, that’s 13 million worth in terms of savings.
So I think that draws to a close. And I just wanted to say that we have a subscription economy report that is going to be published on the 1st of November and we’re doing that in conjunction with the Financial Times and Savanta, which is really exciting. And we’re also going to be at the Subscription Show in New York with Kathy, which we can’t wait. And again, you can pick up hard copies of the subscription report from that event and you can also meet us there at the booth if you choose. Back to you Kathy.
Kathy: Amazing. So let’s dive into Q and A. The first question that came like many, many scrolls ago was the data that you were presenting and that’s a little bit of a slice of data of what’s coming out of this upcoming subscription report. So if you can just… That’ll be coming out November 1st and we can absolutely make sure everybody gets a link to that.
Erica: Yeah, great idea.
Kathy: Yep, absolutely. So there’s a lot of questions going back to bank blocks. So there’s a lot of other questions on the saving plans and all that stuff. I’m going to get to that everybody. But let’s go back to the bank blocks. And if somebody blocks their bank, what specifically happens and why is there a block on that payment card and there’s no communication other than for us to know that the payment was declined. So if you can just go back to the 101 of a payment block, I think that’ll help some of our attendees today.
Erica: So if a consumer is canceling via their bank, then automatically in regulated markets, just regulated markets, but UK, US and Australia, there will be a block of some kind placed. It is at the discretion of the bank and the duration of that is that the discretion of the bank. So it can vary, but we take an average of about 13 months when we’re looking at this. In terms of what is seen by the subscription businesses, they don’t know until there’s a problem usually, when a consumer is contacting. Then they will either go to their bank or they’ll go to their subscription service.
If they go to the subscription service, that’s quite a lot of operational overhead. Usually that’s a operations team’s time spent in then sorting out those customers and actually advising that they need to go back to their bank to unblock their bank card. So this solution is actually removing a lot of that friction and that back and forth and the toing and froing in terms of the communication and working out what the problem is and advising the consumer that they need to unblock their card because it’s not actually that well known by consumers that this is a thing. And actually within many people within the industry, it’s not also not so well understood.
So [inaudible 00:37:43] isn’t any formal comms.
Kathy: What’s the best way to get a view of banks that allow their customers to block subscription payments?
Erica: Say the first bit again Kathy.
Kathy: Oh sure. What’s the best way to get a complete view of banks that allow their customers to block subscription payments?
Erica: Ooh, we’d have to come back on that one. I don’t know how we would get an aerial view of that. Well Minna wouldn’t necessarily have a complete aerial view of that, but we can certainly come back on that.
Kathy: Okay. So the other question was related to, we’re in this demo that you showed us. So that’s communicating to a subscription company’s subscription management platform just to, does it communicate things like this person’s trying to cancel in the middle of a contracted 12 month subscription. What are the types of things that it communicates and it allows the consumer to do or not do?
Erica: Yeah, in short, the work that we are doing as Minna, we will are focused on continuous payment authorities, so subscriptions where you can cancel at any time and ones that don’t have any binding period associated with them. So there wouldn’t be a situation where a consumer has outstanding debt that needs to be paid, for example. So there are some parameters around the scope of this.
Kathy: And then, oh my gosh, so are they canceling at the end of their subs… So if they cancel it’s immediate or at the end of their subscription term?
Erica: Okay, if it’s via a bank, it’s just the blocked bank card and that takes immediate effect. If it’s through Minna, then it very much depends on the subscription business and whether they’ve set a hard cancellation or a soft cancellation. And we would absolutely mirror what the subscription business uses. It might be that they have both options, but we’re only here to mirror what is happening for the subscription business with their consumers in their own channels.
Kathy: So there’s a misconception about payment blocks that I want to just go back to, that I see in some of the questions. So in the ideal world, we want to make sure that everybody’s canceling and managing their subscriptions through us, the subscription business, but our customers are increasingly not doing that. They’re using third party providers and in many times the banking institution that they use offers the ability to cancel a subscription within their banking app. And when that happens, that’s when that payment block happens. So is that a correct understanding of what you said Erica? Because there’s question about why one would refer somebody to a bank to cancel and that wouldn’t be the case at all. We’re just trying to prevent them from blocking payments.
Erica: Yeah, I mean the role of payment processors and subscription billing partners is another conversation and I would be love to come back and talk to you about that, Kathy, as well. So I’m very happy if there’s a lot of interest to come back and talk about that. One part of the work that I do is actually building partnerships with subscription billing platforms and we also work with payment processes. So when we are doing these integrations with subscription businesses, if they have a subscription billing platform or a payment processor in between, we are working with them as well. But typically what we’re able to do is we’re extending that reach into a banking app. And that’s not necessarily something that subscription billing platforms can do right now, but they can if they work with us as an integrated reseller.
Kathy: Okay, great. I hope that answers your question. So here’s a question, and I believe this is about open banking and financial wellness. Is there a specific insight that you are aware of about Europe in relation to this?
Erica: I would say watch this space for our subscription economy report and this will, there’ll be elements of that covered within the subscription economy report. Because that is such a broad question.
Kathy: Okay, it is a broad question. I’m looking at a number of other questions, which I think actually are probably deep dives, that might be best for follow up. So if there’s anything that’s a general question, by all means. The Subscription Economy report is going to be released November 1st. We will make sure that everybody here gets a link to that. Erica will be bringing it with her to the Subscription Show and sharing a couple of interesting learnings at the Subscription Show. So I’m really excited for that.
So keep an eye out on the release of this next week and Subscription Show is in three weeks, just under three weeks, which is just amazing. So with that, I think I’m just going to ask one final question, Erica. As companies, we have some European companies and American companies. So if we’re really starting to look to these banking apps, what is the one recommendation you have, to get started and make things successful, so we’re really recovering these subscribers in revenue.
Erica: It would come back to the come the Minna solutions and the cancellation feature that we have that does the seamless cancellation and then ensures that there’s no block. We actually consider that as the API door opener to the rest of our subscription management. Actually, this feature is free to subscription businesses. So the only consideration for adoption is scheduling this into a technical roadmap. And that usually is between two and six weeks. It’s so light touch even for the more complex ones, it’s still very short. And actually once that first API is integrated, that’s 80% of the work done. Every other feature after that would actually just be maybe another 20% on top. It’s almost like a bit of an update. So for me, the baseline is sorting out the cancellations to drive retention and then we build upon that, saving a point of cancellation, which really helps with retention and driving lifetime value.
Kathy: Brilliant, brilliant. Okay everybody, I think we’re going to call it a day here. We have a lot of questions in the chat. So what we will do, they’re very specific questions, so I will make sure that Erica gets all that information so she can follow up with you directly. And I have to say, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Erica. Thank you so, so much. I’m really looking forward to the release of your report next week, too.
Erica: Wonderful. Thank you very much for the invite, Kathy. It was great. Really appreciated.
Kathy: Absolutely. And to everybody, thank you for your time today. There will be a link sent out later today with a replay and we will be in touch. Until next time and I also hope to see you at Subscription Show 2022. Take care, everybody.
