Billing platforms surge as payments, laws, and markets evolve

Hello. Welcome to Recurly's fall release showcase. I'm Blake Birdwell, product marketing manager. And I'm Jordan Bloom, principal product manager of AI. Got a lot of fresh features for you across the Recurly product suite. We'll dive into those shortly, then I'll hand it off to Jordan to do a live demo of Compass, our AI powered chatbot built for subscriptions.

Let's get into it.

Subscriptions have gone from just another business model to the default relationship between consumers and the brands they trust.

The opportunity has never been greater.

The brands winning today aren't just managing subscriptions. They're mastering them.

They're using data, payments, and now AI to unlock growth in ways that we couldn't have imagined even just a few years ago.

Recurly has been at the heart of the subscription industry for more than fifteen years.

From the early days of streaming to the rise of the subscription box and now entire ecosystems built on recurring relationships.

In that time, we've powered billions of transactions across a hundred and twenty seven global markets, helping the world's most ambitious brands launch, grow, and scale.

But as the saying goes, the only constant is change itself. So with over a decade of experience supporting this incredible community, we've seen firsthand how the landscape is shifting.

Let's talk about the three biggest trends shaping the future of subscriptions.

We're all living in the AI era. It's changing everything, how we work, how we think, and how we move.

For subscription businesses, that means faster insights, smarter automation, and new strategies to grow. AI is no longer a future advantage. It's a competitive requirement.

The second big shift is around retention.

In our state of subscriptions twenty twenty five report, we found that brands investing in subscriber loyalty and engagement are growing almost two and a half times faster than those focused solely on acquisition.

The path to growth today isn't just about getting more subscribers. It's about keeping them longer.

And with these changes, the world has never been more connected.

Your next million subscribers could be anywhere, and the ability to reach them has never been more accessible.

Global expansion is no longer a daunting milestone. Whether it's entering new markets, supporting new payment methods, or meeting local preferences, subscriptions are more global and more dynamic than ever before. At Recurly, our mission has always been to help you stay ahead of what's next, to give you the tools, insights, and automation to power smarter subscriptions.

And this fall, we're taking that even further.

We're building Recurly for subscriber growth in the AI era. This release is built around three pillars, each one designed to unlock a new stage of subscriber growth.

The first pillar is Compass and how we're bringing agentic AI into the heart of the Recurly experience.

Today, Compass surfaces insights and anomalies to help you make better decisions, but now it goes even further. With the Compass Assistant, we're introducing AgenTik AI, an intelligent copilot that doesn't just answer the questions. It takes actions.

Imagine launching an experiment, adjusting pricing, or triggering a retention play all directly in app. We're moving past passive insights into active growth automation. The second pillar is about the evolution of Recurly itself.

For years, we've been known as the industry's most trusted billing and subscription management platform. Now we're expanding into a complete subscriber life cycle growth engine designed to drive engagement, upsells, and retention across every stage of the journey.

With Accurly Engage, you can now segment, personalize, and optimize subscriber experiences in real time from onboarding all the way to renewal. You can create dynamic interstitials, personalized cancellation flows, and targeted offers that keep your best customers engaged longer. And Through Acrylic Commerce, we're helping ecommerce brands move beyond one time transactions to build recurring revenue streams from free trials and tiered memberships to curated box programs, all within the Shopify ecosystem.

When combined, Engage and Commerce connect the entire life cycle, acquisition, engagement, retention, and loyalty in one unified platform.

The third pillar is about global scale.

Scaling globally has always come with complexity, new markets, new currencies, new payment preferences, and taxes. We're removing that friction.

We're expanding support for ACH, SEPA, PIX, and Mercado Pago, introducing new gateways like Fiserv and adding web components and rolling out smarter retries for direct debit. We're also introducing more localized pricing capabilities, giving merchants the ability to personalize plans and prices by regions and convert more subscribers with less effort.

This release is just the beginning. We've built more than thirty new features across the Recurly product suite to help you turn what's next into what's now.

Okay. That was a very quick walk through. I highly encourage you to check out the Recurly release page if you wanna dive into the details.

Jordan, you ready to show off Compass?

Let's do it. Let's.

Compass is embedded throughout our entire platform. So when you log in to Recurly, it's always there to help you out.

When you first log in, Compass greets you with insights that give you an at a glance understanding of business performance.

Insights are presented in a clear and concise way, but you can always dive into the underlying data to get a deeper understanding of what's going on.

We've also added anomaly insights, which will alert you anytime transactions aren't flowing in the way you'd expect.

Anomaly insights help you quickly identify sudden increases in transaction failures, trial declines, fraud warnings, and more, so it's easy to take corrective action immediately.

Let's say you're tasked with reducing churn for your business.

You may notice insights related to churn rate trends that will help you understand how your business is performing against previous months and against global benchmarks.

If you're looking for a quick way to improve key metrics, start with our playbooks.

Playbooks are solution oriented, guided experiences that cut straight to the chase.

They're focused on addressing the most common challenges with clear and actionable steps.

If you need to learn more about a certain term, find your way around the app, or explore what tools Recurly offers to help you out, that's where Compass Assistant comes in.

Compass Assistant is your always on subscription management expert.

Let's use Compass Assistant to learn more about churn.

I see two categories of churn referenced across Recurly. But if I'm new to the platform or new to subscriptions altogether, I may need some help understanding.

Instead of reading all the documentation, we can have Compass Assistant read and summarize it for us.

That's a really helpful answer. And if I want to learn more, Compass Assistant has pulled together some resources where I can.

Now that I understand the fundamentals, I wanna know more about how my business is performing.

Recurly offers so many helpful dashboards, but sometimes I have trouble finding just the right one.

Let's see if Compass Assistant can give us a pointer.

The subscriber churn analysis dashboard sounds just right, but I'm still not sure exactly where to find it. Let's get help with that too.

After having a look, I think I want to focus on reducing involuntary churn.

My numbers are great, but I want to make them even better.

Compass Assistant can help advise me on useful tools Recurly offers to address my challenge.

With just a little help from Compass, I'm now ready to make a big impact on my business.

Compass Assistant is more than navigation and documentation, though.

It's also here to support you through real action.

Let's imagine I'm on the support team, and I'm fielding a call from Alan.

We recently rolled out the silver two month plan, and Alan signed up right away. But he says he's getting billed every two weeks.

Let's figure out what's going on.

First, we'll find Alan's account and make sure he's on the silver two month Plan.

That all looks good to me.

Let's learn a little bit more about our silver plan.

Giving these plans a closer look, I think I see our problem.

Our silver two month plan is actually configured to bill every two weeks.

Now we'll want to inform all of our existing subscribers, but I wanna cut this off. So I'm gonna rename that plan right here, and right now.

Great. So now that I've been promoted to be the guy who sets up all the plans, I think I wanna take things to the next level.

I'm rolling out a new AI service, and I wanna bill customers based on how many tokens they consume.

I'm not sure what that's called, but it sounds pretty complicated to set up.

I'm sure the documentation would be a big help right now, but instead, I'll just have Compass walk me through the setup.

Compass Assistant will use its deep knowledge of Recurly documentation and industry best practices to guide me through the configuration step by step.

Together, we'll create measured units, plans, add ons, items taking me from zero to ready.

Before I roll out my new AI service, I need to make sure my app can actually track the usage.

Let's see if Compass can help me out with some of the code.

Now I don't know Python, but that looks pretty awesome.

I have code snippets and documentation ready to share with my engineering team, and it looks like the last thing I need is an API token. I'll have Compass help me out here too so the team can get to work Right away.

Alright. Thanks, Jordan. Of course.

Alright. Again, if you wanna dive into any more of the details of anything you saw today, please go check out the Recurly release page.

Until then, we'll see you next time.

Our CEO did at the time. So he's a product guy. He really just wants to build cool things.

He's like, hey. Look. Like, there's always a decision whether you wanna buy or build. Right?

But I'm not a I'm not an expert at subscriptions. So I would like to find a platform, and I think he went with Referraly because it is a platform that is very it it's it's very catered towards a subscription business. Right? So our model is a piece of hardware plus a subscription to service that.

And since then, we've launched we're on the fourth we're on the fourth fourth version of our products. All of the prior ones are in existence, so, like, those still run on Recurly. So it's kind of like it's it's easy to launch a product because it's all automated in terms of the reporting that we get back. And then we actually launched a subscription product that is in the form of supplements. And that's also that was also easy to to do on the Pro League. Sixty sixty to seventy percent of our revenue is renewals right now. Our money goes into our growth but like our revenue comes from our renewals.

For some time we had a specialized team on retention. The one thing they saw that worked the best was free cut. Hey. I've hit some financial trouble. We'll move them from a prepaid plan to a monthly plan and and support them through that. Our job is to make it work for them, and to keep their dog protected.

But we do use Recurly as the platform of record for our revenue. My team is three people on the accounting side, and they cover FP and A, they cover sales operations, and they cover accounting. I think that speaks to how much of these processes are automated and how much of it is that it just works out of the rock. You know, the backbone of the company is that subscriptions are powering everything that we do going forward.