Prism, a consumer-focused bill-pay product, was discontinued on February 20, 2024. However, apps that help you track and pay your bills are here to stay. So it’s important for us to figure out why Prism failed. After all, history often repeats itself, and you wouldn’t want to move to another app that could suffer the same fate in the near future.
A Brief History of Prism Money
Founded by Tyler Griffin and Steve Gordon in 2011 as Mobilligy Inc., Prism’s original name reflected the initial lack of vision of its founders.
“When we started Prism, my cofounder and I had no idea what we wanted to build. We were searching for the right problem to solve.”
— Tyler Griffin, Co-founder and former CEO of Prism
On August 20, 2014, Griffin and Gordon articulated and advanced their vision of the company, resulting in Mobilligy being rebranded into Prism Money.
According to Griffin, the name Prism Money reflected their commitment to creating simplified, transparent tools that can organize financial information into meaningful and actionable segments.
In 2016, Prism caught the attention of PayNearMe, which led to their acquisition. The acquisition also resulted in Griffin and Gordon’s departure from the company.
On October 15, 2018, BillGO acquired Prism, which had processed a total of $1B in consumer payments at the time.
In January 2021, Prism’s app redesign resulted in a massive backlash from its users. In an open letter, David Jones, the President and General Manager of Prism at the time, stated that they “incorrectly assumed would fall in love with the new design and fresh features.”
In December 2023, Prism announced that they would be shutting down on February 20, 2024.
Prism’s Vision and How They Lost It
“…providing the tools our customers need to break up challenges along the way into meaningful and individually addressable chunks.” — Tyler Griffin
Prism hit its stride when its founders focused on their vision of creating a fintech app that’s simple, transparent, meaningful, and actionable. When Griffin and Gordon left the company in 2016, the vision that they left behind allowed Prism to grow continuously until 2021.
In their haste to modernize the app, the 2021 redesign of Prism deviated from that vision. The beta testers of the redesign described it as vibrant, beautiful, intuitive, and enjoyable.
“Like most people, we hate bills, and we believe our customers should spend the least amount of time possible thinking about them. The redesign aims to deliver that.”
— Matt Gordon, Senior Product Designer of Prism
As mentioned earlier, Prism users disliked the redesign, to say the least. And why wouldn’t they? They were drawn to the original vision of the product, and the rug was pulled from under them.
Prism shutting down two years after the redesign proves that moving away from its original vision is one of the reasons for its downfall. Finally, even with Prism’s deviation from its vision, it most likely would have survived had it listened to its users.
