By David Jones, President and General Manager, Prism
To the Prism community,
Since launching in 2011, Prism has grown into one of the most widely-used bill pay apps in the world. We owe this success to our active and passionate user base. During the last decade, we’ve learned a lot about how people like to pay their bills and what features and functionalities they value most in a bill pay app.
Before going on, it’s important I make this clear: all of Prism’s success in the first decade took place before I and many of my new team members came on board. The first generation of Prism employees (most of whom are still here) worked long hours to create a world-class app. When I and my new teammates joined Prism this year, we knew we had big shoes to fill, but we looked forward to the challenge.
Even before we came on board, plans were underway to make Prism even better. Our goal was to make bill management even easier, more intuitive and more enjoyable than it was before.
We put in a lot of hard work in reaching that goal, but our users were less than impressed: our update missed the mark.
Why update an award-winning app that has been used by consumers to pay more than $1 billion in bills? Because — for nearly a year — we promised users an app redesign and felt obliged to deliver on that promise. Obviously, our intentions were good. And — thanks to the support we’ve gotten from thousands of users over the years — we incorrectly assumed they would fall in love with the new design and fresh features.
Simply put, we were wrong.
I’m not going to make excuses: the app was released too early. Prism’s culture and the personality of our team is to face issues head on. We now realize we could have — and should have — devoted more time to testing prior to the release. We also should have invited you — our users — to test our new redesign before releasing it. These are only two of the lessons we’ve learned.
There were others, but rather than dwell on those, we are actively addressing bugs in the new design and fixing the issues our users have brought to our attention.
We recognize the important role that Prism plays in our users’ lives. They have trusted us to manage their bills and we take that trust seriously. That is why we continue to work hard to make monitoring and paying bills and subscriptions as intuitive and reliable as possible. Prism has always existed to delight our users on their path to financial wellbeing, and that means we are doubling down on our efforts to usher in the next stage of everyone’s favorite bill pay app.
We have many exciting new features we plan to introduce in the coming months including subscription management, one-time-use virtual cards, bill management analytics, the ability to pay any biller and so much more. In other words, the best is yet to come.
We are grateful we have such an active and passionate user community supporting our efforts. You have all been instrumental in shaping the success we’ve experienced so far. And, thanks to your continued feedback and support, I’m confident Prism will continue to be the absolute best bill management app in the world.
Thank you for your ongoing support.
Gratefully,
Dave Jones,
President and General Manager
Prism
