Prism, a consumer-focused bill pay product, has announced that its app will be officially discontinued on February 20, 2024. Prism’s users are scrambling to find a replacement bill-pay app that’s as simple, functional, and as easy to use as Prism.
But before making the jump to the next app, it’s important to find out why Prism failed in the first place. 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 the company’s commitment to improving the lives of its customers by providing simplified transparent tools that can organize financial information into meaningful and actionable segments.
In 2016, Prism was processing roughly $15M in consumer payments every month. This caught the attention of PayNearMe which acquired Prism Money in the same year. 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 launched a redesign of their app that resulted in a massive backlash from their 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 continuously grow 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.
Cushion’s Vision and How It’s Reinforced
Cushion’s vision is to be the most powerful way to make recurring payments
The world of bills and recurring expenses has evolved so much over the past 20 years. We went from managing a handful of essential bills to juggling dozens of subscriptions and Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) loans.
Worse yet, losing track of these expenses results in late fees and decreased credit scores. To solve this problem, Cushion provides the tools that ease the burden of managing your recurring payments all while building your credit history seamlessly.
One of the ways this is done is by organizing all your recurring payments in one dashboard. But we’re continuously working on new features that can allow us to bring our vision into reality.
Cushion’s founder and CEO, Paul Kesserwani articulates and advances our vision for the company on a weekly basis. While our Customer Experience Manager, Emily Onimus constantly keeps in touch with our users to find out what they like about the app and which aspects can be improved.
This dedication to Cushion’s vision and respect for our users’ opinions has resulted in our newest feature: Calendar Wizard!
We found that many of our users track their bills by setting reminders on Google Calendar. And since we’re already tracking all of their recurring payments in-app, why not export that information to their Google Calendar as well?
With just one click, our users can add all of their recurring payments to their personal calendars. Better yet, this bill calendar updates itself automatically, in real-time!
Our users who don’t use their Google Calendar for bill management are completely unaffected by this change. They can still use the Cushion app to manage all of their recurring payments as usual.
