The payments industry, which is facing a massive amount of disruption as we enter a new decade, has a valuable new resource today as The Futurist Group has officially announced its launch.
Built by a team of experienced professionals with deep backgrounds in payments, fintech, product management, customer research and more, The Futurist Group has developed a robust suite of research tools and actionable insights designed to demystify the complexity of the fast-changing payments space and identify practical innovation opportunities while minimizing time and expense.
In the lead-up to its launch, The Futurist Group has devoted a significant amount of time, research and resources to building a platform of payments products and consumer insights that immediately becomes a tremendous resource for any product professional tasked with understanding and mapping the payments universe.
“How do you help payments professionals better understand the current trends and find opportunities for new product development?” asked Demitry Estrin, Co-Founder of The Futurist Group. “You map the entire space, and that’s exactly what we’ve done and continue to do. Our Product Innovation Intelligence Platform is a first of its kind offering and a powerful tool for the industry.”
“We now have a resource that captures the entire payments landscape, including product features from all major providers and new entrants,” added Mr. Estrin. “Our data collection is always on, allowing us to capture consumer reactions to new product enhancements as they are introduced into the market. By layering innovation on top of all the products that exist today, our analytics platform is uniquely designed to identify product enhancement opportunities in real-time.”
As of its launch, The Futurist Group has collected and analyzed more than 700 payments features, from the obvious like cash back rewards to the more esoteric like biometric security features. Additionally, the firm has a vast database of consumer reviews, resulting in a collection of insights at a level of granularity never before available, as each of those 700 features can be analyzed writ large or through the lens of 40 specific consumer segments.
“Using our platform, payments professionals now have the ability to quickly identify which features in a credit card portfolio, for example, need to be emphasized to maximize target customer acquisition and profitable usage. They also have the ability to do a deep dive into a product or feature category and identify what the consumers see as real innovation versus what they consider to be ‘noise,’” added Mr. Estrin, a long-time veteran of the consumer research space who previously held senior roles with firms including Maru Matchbox, Vision Critical, and Ipsos. During his career, Demitry has worked with many of the largest financial services and fintech organizations in the world, helping them collect, analyze, and act on sophisticated consumer intelligence.
Estrin is joined by co-founders Vidya Subramani and Jane Tang, who together bring more than 60 years of combined consumer research and payments industry experience.
Ms. Subramani is Chief Client Officer with The Futurist Group and is an experienced leader in the consumer insights space, with a particular emphasis on financial services and the retail industry. Prior to founding The Futurist Group, Ms. Subramani was Vice President and Director of Voice of the Customer at U.S. Bank. She also previously headed the market research and competitive intelligence function for the Payments Group at U.S. Bank.
“We could not be more excited to be bringing our approach to the payments industry,” said Ms. Subramani. “By bringing clarity to what has become a highly disrupted space, we can help payments professionals separate themselves and their ideas from what we call the ‘sea of sameness’ in payments features and offers, and find ways to stand out and build more profitable products.”
Ms. Tang is Chief Data Scientist at The Futurist Group and brings 20 years of experience as a statistician with experience in analytical consulting, with a particular focus on new product development and strategic pricing research. Previously, she also held senior roles with Maru Matchbox, Vision Critical and Ipsos.
“It was important to us that we not just build the world’s most complete resource for understanding the payments universe, but that we also bring clarity to that data,” said Ms. Tang. “Those are conversations we’re already having with a number of major players in this space, and discussions we look forward to starting with others, as we help them better understand the competitive landscape, find opportunities, and build hyper-relevant benchmarks so they can gauge their success.”
“Payments product management teams can no longer afford to wait for competitive intelligence, product design feedback, and consumer segment insight,” adds Ms. Tang. “It is imperative that these teams receive proactive, accurate, detailed, and prescriptive context about the marketplace, and they need that context at the speed of business. That is the challenge we have designed The Futurist Group to help solve.”
Mr. Estrin also added, “We’re thrilled to be marking our official launch, and have significant plans to expand the scope of the platform in the coming months. While we have focused on the payments space at our launch, our platform is engineered to map the larger fintech universe, and we’re very excited for what the future holds both for our offering and for the promise the broader fintech space holds in so many areas.”
For more information on The Futurist Group, please visit https://www.thefuturistgroup.com/
Journalists interested in learning more about how the media can leverage The Futurist Group’s research, consumer intelligence, data, and insights, please contact Chris Sullivan of MacMillan Communications at (212) 473-4442 or chris@macmillancom.com.
About The Futurist Group
The Futurist Group helps identify what’s next in payments, using modern technology, frictionless consumer engagement, and intelligent analytics to provide answers to the most important and forward-looking questions about the future of payments. Dedicated to the financial services space, The Futurist Group was founded by an experienced team of professionals from consumer intelligence, fintech, banking, analytics, and payments. For more information, visit: https://www.thefuturistgroup.com/
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