In our latest article from our “Best of Subscription Show” series, Eva Rapp, managing director and head of pricing and billing transformation at JP Morgan, and Dennis Wall, CEO of BillingPlatform, shared their experiences of navigating the ever-changing landscape of billing and payments.

When it comes to delivering a frictionless customer experience, all business owners want to know the secret. Luckily for Subscription Insider members and Subscription Show 2021 attendees, they received a key formula from experts in the field.

Subscription business owners know they need to plan for the heart of their business ‒ recurring payments. It’s important to understand them fully. This ensures amazing customer experiences despite all of the complexities behind making those recurring payments happen seamlessly. Customers, no matter the industry, just want things to be simple.

As Rapp and Wall discussed during Subscription Show 2021, there are three key points to consider: rapidly-changing customer experience and expectations; innovation driving non-standard offerings; and the issues with the lack of a fully integrated ecosystem.

Rapidly-changing customer experience and expectations

Even without a pandemic to spur dramatic and fast change, what the customer wants and how they want it is always evolving. This is a challenge for any organization because every customer wants ease of access and one-click use. And if they don’t get it, they find competitors who do offer it. Whether in a B2B or B2C environment, customers want a highly personalized, frictionless experience.

“What’s interesting in our space of wholesale banking [is] there was a hope or a belief 10 years ago that B2B is B2B and B2C is B2C. Except that our clients are people who are consumers, who are benefitting from all of the advances occurring in the B2C space,” says Rapp.

Thus, the clients in the B2B space are increasingly asking for B2C functionality. They see it in their own lives, like when they order pizza and see the status updates in the associated app. They want to see the same type of service in their business.

“A sense of radical transparency and ease of use has seeped into [customer] expectations,” says Rapp.

Now it’s up to organizations to serve it to them, hot and fresh.The tricky part is expertly managing what the customer can’t see in order to deliver on customer requests.

“It is a challenge when you start to really dig into the complexities that are being managed. When you peel back the layers and understand the complexities of the system…all of this is completely invisible to the user. But at the same time, you have to be able to deliver that kind of frictionless customer experience,” says Wall.

Even if recurring, stable volume is present in the company, customers are less inclined to understand why they have to pay a variety of different bills from one organization. This means companies have to have the right mechanism for counting and keeping track of it.

Innovation is driving non-standard offerings

In addition to staying on top of rapidly-changing customer expectations, organizations now must offer their customers innovation. If the organization doesn’t offer innovation, the customer will move to a competitor that does.

The front office, competition, and market dynamics are just a few of the forces pushing companies to rethink how they monetize and execute transactions with their customers. Companies can no longer assume customers will pay for any subscription they offer. The market is driving the need to think about how goods and services are monetized, as well as the variety of ways the consumer wants to buy. It’s through these considerations that innovation is born.

With changes in the way businesses operate in this new ecosystem and the shift to more sophisticated ways of selling and monetizing products, it’s no surprise that industries are transforming.

“I love this topic because ‘non-standard offerings’ can be a dirty word in a highly regulated industry like mine,” says Rapp.

It can be a challenge, Rapp says, but it’s also an opportunity if businesses can read the client’s needs the right way and, to the extent they can, future-proof the ecosystem to adapt to changing needs.

Ultimately, that’s what JP Morgan is trying to do. When a client asks for a certain product, but with some tweaks, it’s up to JP Morgan to uphold the delivery including those tweaks. Offering the “standard product” will not meet the client expectations; they’ll just walk away if they can’t get what they want. Ensuring companies have the right product delivery ecosystem allows them to make changes to the products based on the right data model independent of what that product is today. This is a very intricate and modern way to set up an ecosystem. Ultimately, businesses want to plan for the type of change they’re going to hear about from clients.

Wall believes it’s a little bit of technology and a little bit of process.

“Any company, when they think about business models [or] pricing models, needs to find some levels of standardization so they can have consistency and thereby be able to run analytics, see trends, and do real analysis. But if you’re starting from a place where you’re looking at it from a platform perspective, and you can eliminate some of the data silos and manage as one common platform, it puts you 90% ahead of most of the people in the market,” says Wall.

At the enterprise level, what it takes to turn on a product ‒ to go through all of the various stakeholders and technologies dependencies and IT dependencies ‒ is pretty daunting. But, as Wall points out, subscription businesses can do this by leveraging more platform configuration, low-code kind of solutions. It’s a powerful way to increase the velocity to revenue and profitability.

That’s the key to embracing the innovation that customers will request. It’s not just about product engineers going into a lab and creating the next “thing.”

“Businesses have to be able to respond to what your clients need with specific types of capabilities,” says Rapp.

Whether a company is responding to these innovation requests proactively or just responding to market dynamics and competition, not having the tools that enable innovation quickly, effectively, and efficiently will have a meaningful impact on the way the organization does business. At the current pace those types of changes and evolution are accelerating, companies will end up two to three steps behind and not able to keep pace with competitors.

Lack of a fully integrated ecosystem

The ability to manage change in a way that best serves the customer relies heavily on the ecosystem in which it operates. But how do companies create a fully-integrated system that allows their subscription business to run?

There are many people who have worked for companies where the technology didn’t allow for innovation and evolution. It’s a core issue for many businesses. Even if these businesses know how important it is, it’s hard to prepare for the future. Future-proofing a business requires overcoming functional and technical silos that impede an organization’s ability to innovate.

“Banks are famous for getting this wrong,” says Rapp.

Banking technology is very old ‒ think 70s and 80s-era mainframe systems ‒ and they don’t do what customers want in today’s world. While change can’t happen all at once, deploying a very aggressive technology agenda and designing the ecosystem in a way that allows companies to understand how their products will behave in the next 10 to 20 years is a great solution.

“When I think about an integrated ecosystem and how it relates to revenue management processes, if you’re able to automate your revenue management processes, subscription data, basic transactional data, all usage on a common platform, there are a couple of benefits to it,” says Wall.

First, companies need to understand the general underlying costs of systems that need support. Dealing with silos, different processes and countless spreadsheets can create confusion, causing revenue leakage, manual errors, and a host of opportunities for greater risk. With this understanding of costs, that data becomes available that allows for changes to be made.

Second, companies need to be able to leverage the data to understand trends and overlay ML, AI and business intelligence-type tools where they can be more predictive and can deliver a better customer experience.

“The ecosystem approach opens up a world of opportunities. Certainly one specific platform system doesn’t support everything, so the need to be able to integrate both upstream as well as downstream systems as well as a few along the way does introduce a world of opportunities and change the game for business,” says Wall.

What Rapp is doing at JP Morgan is considering what the right domains and the specific areas are that have to behave in a certain way and have certain capabilities.

“[N]o one platform can do everything you need because these ecosystems are intricate and there are a lot of specific functions that still have to be performed. They don’t need to be siloed, so they don’t need to have their own monolith mainframe that does everything but keeps everything closed within its walls,” says Rapp.

In a billing example, JP Morgan will bill their clients for their activity with them. The bills contain plenty of data, but where are the insights? Recently, JP Morgan worked to harness that data to better understand what services they charged for and why. They’ve taken it a step further to synthesize that data and make recommendations to the organizations they work with on how to eliminate inefficiencies within their business processes.

“The ability to take all of that data, turn it into analytic insight, and help our clients is a great example of needing to unleash it from the silo that held that data in the first place,” says Rapp.

Creating communication between silos is the key to success. This creates an ecosystem that is able to manage change as it arrives as well as create even more value for the client.

While these three topics seem individual, they’re actually very interconnected. In order to deliver the best experience possible to your customer, it’s crucial to consider how to improve in each of these three areas. Through listening to customers, innovating where possible, and creating a fully-integrated ecosystem, subscription businesses will future-proof their business to the best of their ability.