“For most Americans, paying bills is managing their finances. This stress is being enhanced rather than reduced by banks and billers, and we recognized that it was a problem that we could solve with technology.” -- Prism CEO Tyler Griffin
@badboyboyce@kunaltandon I was using Prism on Android. the main issue I ran up against was that upcoming bills screen didn't show the full amount owed. It only seems to show the minimum payment amount. That pretty much defeats the purpose for me as I want to pay the entire balance owed in full.I don't want to incur interest charges by carrying a balance.
I really love the idea of Prism @timesnewrachel, but unless I can pay the full balance (or at least enter a custom amount to pay) then there is really no use for the app for me.
The Check app from Intuit offers a similar feature-set and is my current app of choice, but I think the Prism UI/UX is better and I hope to switch back one day.
https://play.google.com/store/ap...
@sixside thanks for the input. That is a HUGE issue, and less than ideal. I also would want to pay off the entire balance owed and not just make minimum payments.
@badboyboyce@kunaltandon@sixside Thanks for chiming in, Jason! I'm happy to tell you that you can pay more than the minimum amount due on your credit cards and insurance payments (you can pay up to the total statement balance). Simply tap on your bill, then tap on the top bar that shows the payment amount; the total statement balance will be an available payment amount option. We also just released an update where if you pay the total amount due, that will be the amount we show on the homescreen and upcoming bills screen going forward. I hope this helps! We'd love to have you back!
@timesnewrachel good to know, I'll take another look.
Is there a limit on the amount that can be paid? With Check I was running into issues where there was a cap on the amount I could pay. I tend to put some pretty large charges on some of my biz cards each month and therefore need to make large (over $5000) payments.
@timesnewrachel hey Rachel- thanks for joining the convo. Any idea about the app only showing minimum payment amounts rather than full amount owed as described by Jason in another comment.
@kunaltandon Of course! Thanks for your question. I'm happy to tell you that we do support paying up to the total statement balance! We default to showing the minimum amount due on the homescreen until you pay your bill; once you pay your bill, we'll show the total statement balance as the amount due on the homescreen if that's the amount you paid. I hope this helps!
Very intuitive, and my eye-candy loving self is a huge fan of the logo! Kind of reminds me of slice.com but for bills. One thing I like about slice is that it alerts you when the price of something you bought recently drops, you could implement a similar concept here and notify me with tips/tricks to lower my bill.
@ghobs91 Thanks for joining in! That's great feedback, and I'll definitely pass it along to the team. Of note, we will alert you when the amount of a bill had either dropped or increased significantly from the prior month, so you know to check it out. Thanks again!
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This is such a REAL problem. Many in lower income communities are often the ones paying the most in late fees and overdraft charges which in many cases can be avoided. I'm glad they didn't just launch it on IOS but on android as well since the people that would really benefit from this app it tend to favor android.
@belaurie We absolutely agree! We do everything that we can to help our customers avoid these nasty fees. They always come at the worst possible time, and, believe it or not, the typical American family spends $430 per year on these kinds of fees. A big reason we started Prism was to help our customers avoid this stuff and escape the stress and anxiety of bills. We hope you love it!
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Cool! How are you guys pulling in financial data? Yodlee/Intuit/Plaid/OFX? Are you also processing the ACH for BillPay?
@suneelius Thanks for your question! We don't use any third parties; we pull all of your information directly from the biller's website. Similarly, we make your payments directly to the biller, so we're able to accept any form of payment that the biller allows, including ACH (eCheck) and often times credit cards – all without any additional fees. I hope this helps!
@timesnewrachel@suneelius Hi Rachel; I've been looking into using a product like prism but curious about how you get the data. Are you scraping the billing websites to get the info?
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@yasrostom@timesnewrachel I'm also curious. Want to switch to Prism but I want something where I can actually see the bills, not just the amount due. Want to be sure I'm not being over-charged. Does Prism show you the actual bills?
Just downloaded the app, set up all my bills (rent included, I'm glad my management company is listed), added my bank account, and made my first payment. Everything was a breeze! The design looks really good as well.
Very helpful app! Only request would be if we could see our recent bank transactions as well. I know doing so would make this app veer more into a budgeting app, but great job on everything so far! Have already told my girlfriend about it, as well as a few other friends.
One question, since the app is free. What are your monetization plans?
@jadlimcaco Hi there, and thanks for the kind words! Showing bank ledger (and credit card) transactions is absolutely something that we want to offer in the future, and we know that it would be a major help to our customers!
We have found a novel and unique way to make bill payment free, and we’ll never charge for that. Besides, we think it’s ridiculous to pay for the “privilege” of paying a bill online. That said, we have a ton of really exciting premium features that we are planning to roll out over the next few months that help make the product even better for our customers and in some cases help us finance the company. (Right now we’re backed by A-list investors, and we’re pretty big fans of them). Thanks for asking!
Very interested in giving this a try. I hope it's Canadian-friendly :)
On a separate note: the copy at the bottom about it being secure because all the info is stored on "our ultra-secure cloud" isn't very reassuring. Why does any information need to be stored at all? After all, isn't it just supposed to be a wrapper over my bills? The best security would be to save everything locally on the user's device. It would absolve Prism of any security breaches too.
@alirtariq Unfortunately, we don't support any Canadian billers yet, but if you have any US based accounts, you can absolutely use us!
We do need to store some information about your bills so we can access your accounts and present them to you in the app. Rest assured that if someone steals your phone, there's nothing there for them to see; we don't store any sensitive information on your device, and everything is encrypted with bank-level security.
@alirtariq@timesnewrachel Hey Rachel - the Sony breach has shaken many people's faith in the ability for large institutions to protect valuable information. Obviously, that has nothing to do with you. With that said, there is definitely just less trust in the system; not your fault, but possibly your problem. How do you think about that?
@alirtariq@EAWharton It's a great question, and something we’ve thought about a lot! We built Prism from the ground up to be secure; we knew from the beginning that we would be dealing with highly sensitive information. We do a lot of things behind-the-scenes to help protect our customers and insulate them from common mistakes. As an example, our system virtually eliminates the risk of phishing, since we verify the identity and SSL certificates of every biller before we even add them to our system. We also do not allow sending money to arbitrary entities; every transaction possible in our system is fully traceable to a legitimate biller.
All of our developers have experience working on large-scale highly secure consumer products, and our goal is to make security transparent for our customers but also bulletproof against hackers. You can read about what we do in a bunch more detail here: https://www.prismmoney.com/about...
While we can’t prevent your bank from being compromised, we certainly can guarantee you that your information is safe with us!
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