Mastercard has acquired a Swedish company Minna Technology. This acquisition has brought under focus the concept of subscription management.

What we are seeing now a days is that the users are moving way from the single large payment to subscription based service that pay per use or payments distributed over multiple time units.

One of the hard problem for this has been subscription management and then unsubscribing at the right time. Unless you are one of those people who scrutinizes your credit card bills very closely each month, this is a very tough task.

Minna tried to solve this problem. But Mastercard’s acquisition tells us that this area is going to be of extreme importance in coming years.

Challenges for subscription management

A lot of businesses purely exist on subscriptions. Netflix is a good example. Netflix does not want this core metrics of their business to leak to anyone else. Hence Netflix has strong reasons not provide an API to subscriptions and unsubscribe operations.

Some have tried to solve this using headless chrome approach. Truebill or Rocket Money is one such product. However it is very brittle.

Upcoming regulations in this space.

FTC is planning a new regulation that would force the SASS providers to provide a single click unsubscribe option. This option would enable the consumers to unsubscribe from their services with a single click and without chatting or making a phone call with irritating customer service.

If this regulation goes through we will see greater possibility of subscription management services.

What are your thoughts?

What do you think could be some interesting ideas in this space that are work exploring ? Let us know.