Mastercard
Smart Subscriptions is a B2B2C open banking loyalty product that allows users to easily track and manage all their subscriptions across every account directly through their bank's mobile app. With the average consumer holding 10+ active subscriptions across multiple cards and accounts, overspend and forgotten charges are common. Smart Subscriptions solves this by centralizing visibility and control within the banking experience users already trust.
What we built
The product connects to an issuer's platform via open banking, surfacing subscription spend and giving users tools to manage, pause, or cancel services. It was soon to market test with the first pilot partner during my time on the team.
The Process
Smart Subscriptions went through four phases from initial concept to market test. I joined as the team moved from concept into active prototyping, and my role spanned consumer experience, product ownership, and project management across the full arc.
Concept & Solution Design
The core product direction was set when I joined the team: a subscription management experience embedded within an issuer's existing mobile app, built on top of Finicity — Mastercard's open banking company — and an external technology partner. The decision to partner externally rather than build in-house was intentional; it was faster, more cost-effective, and the partner already had an established Finicity relationship we could leverage.
Ideation & Validation
We ran two rounds of research: interviews with financial institutions to validate issuer-side fit, and consumer usability testing using a Design Quality Score framework — measuring ease, effectiveness, and emotional response — to prioritize our MVP feature set. I helped draft the interview guides, conducted several sessions myself, and pulled the actionable insights that fed directly into our MVP prioritization. The findings shaped our product decisions: I pushed to pull offer-heavy features from the MVP, simplified the visual design, and added a FAQ section to address recurring questions about data usage that kept surfacing across sessions.
Prototyping & Development
In the development phase, I served as the liaison between our designer, internal tech lead, and the external vendor's development team, making sure design decisions from research actually made it into the product. I co-led agile sessions with our tech lead, wrote and reviewed user stories, and ran daily syncs with the vendor to track open bugs, release timelines, and new requests.
Market Test
We piloted first with an internal associate cohort before launching with our first issuer partner. In parallel, I built the materials needed to take the product to market: sales decks, a marketing video, and integration documentation for issuers. KPIs at this stage were largely forward-looking: DQS scores, usability testing outcomes, and issuer feedback as proxies for eventual adoption metrics.