History of Rebar Technology and President Nick Fredrick
Nick Fredrick, President of Rebar Technology, started his career at Affinion – a customer engagement company that processes over a billion transactions a year. He describes how his experience there helped expose him to knowledge – which he still uses today at Rebar Technology – of different payment methods, processes, and partners. This experience led him to work at W. Capra Consulting, the firm that launched Rebar Technology.
Rebar Technology was first created in order to fill a gap that W. Capra Consulting saw through working with subscription clients. For bigger subscription businesses, it became exceedingly difficult to find platforms that could support all of their unique requirements and user stories. There were many different third-party platforms that could be pieced together to accommodate all of the requirements, but nothing that was centralized.
W. Capra Consulting’s solution to this was Rebar. Rebar takes a modular approach to subscription systems by building out many common micro-service modules and combining specific components, as well as other third-party components, to form a centralized platform. This allows them to serve all the unique needs that different subscription businesses have.
Why Should Businesses Consider Moving Into Subscription?
Businesses should consider offering a subscription model for both internal and external reasons. Internally, having a subscription model allows the business to have predictable, recurring revenue, and in turn, stability. Externally, subscription models allow businesses to continuously engage with customers over long periods of time, rather than in a one-time capacity.
What Should Businesses Be Aware of Before Entering Into the Subscription Space?
Scalability
On the technological side, a subscription business’s main challenge is being able to account for scalability. It’s important for businesses to consider where they want to be in five years and to determine whether the people, processes, and systems in place will also be able to grow and fit the new requirements of future scale.
Chargebacks
Subscription businesses also want to avoid chargebacks. Chargebacks can happen for any number of reasons – customers may have not realized what they were signing up for, they may have forgotten they signed up, they may have buyers’ remorse, and so on.
Once a business accumulates too many chargebacks, payment processors, such as Visa or Mastercard, begin to put the business on their radar. This can lead to many different complications, the worst being if the payment processor bans the business from using their service altogether.
Subscription businesses should be careful to both avoid chargebacks, and also track chargebacks. This allows businesses to see how things are trending, and if chargeback rates are trending negatively, it gives businesses time to turn things around before the payment processor contacts them.
Rebar Technology’s Approach
When Rebar Technology works with a subscription business, they approach everything collaboratively. Rebar helps businesses look at their entire ecosystem, from systems to third-party vendors (e.g. fulfillment vendors, tax vendors, etc.) to ensure that the business is equipped to scale.
There is huge potential for growth in subscription. In fact, since the start of COVID-19, there have been 96 million new subscriptions added. However, businesses entering into subscription need to be extra careful about putting the right systems in place so that their business can scale successfully.
In the future, Rebar will continue to grow their core business, which is integrating a number of different components together while accounting for trends. This could mean solving for new payment methods (e.g. bitcoin), growth trends (e.g. expanding internationally), and so on.
Closing Note from Rebar Technology President, Nick Fredrick
Based on experience in his own career, Nick’s advice for those working in financial technology (fin-tech) industries to work in different areas of fintech until you find something to specialize in (e.g. banking, payments, etc.). After finding that specialization, Nick suggests following that path and becoming an expert in the topic so that you become the go-to person for that type of expertise, and people start to seek you out for everything related to that topic.
He ends with another valuable piece of advice: “Don’t let great be the enemy of good.”
You can learn more about Rebar Technology Solutions in this episode of Paypod: The Payments and Fintech Podcast.