Future trends: what's new in the subscription world & at Sage?

2 minute read time.

"We are surrounded by constant change – the role of artificial intelligence growing day by day, a near ubiquitous shift to the cloud and technology disruption in all aspects of our lives.

At Sage we are a force behind technology innovation and our customers are right at the heart of it. We are the only business that can take a growing company from start-up to scale-up through to an enterprise offering accounting, payroll, people, and payments & banking services in the cloud." - Hardin, Nicole Dir, Product Management

What's new?

"For the Worldwide Payments and Banking team, we're taking on the challenge of helping business builders get paid faster and easier with Sage Business Cloud Payments and Banking solutions." - Smith, Seamus EVP Payments & Banking

Why subscriptions?

"Car firms have traditionally made their money by selling and then servicing cars. With the salesman on commission for each sale. Currently a number of car firms are looking to offer a subscription service whereby customers pay an amount each month and have use of a car when they want it. Service, Insurance and delivery all taken care of. This is not the same as a lease; a lease is for a particular car over a set period of time. Car firms see this subscription model as being the money maker going forward. In the US there is now an airline that offers a similar monthly subscription service and passengers can board their planes whenever they like, they even get Fast Track security priority as part of the service package. " - Robins, Kevin Chief Information Officer

Similar to the examples above, software companies are now seeing subscriptions as a sustainable business model for moving forward and being able to provide security, compliance and reliability to end users.

How is Sage applying subscriptions?

"… Rather than sell our products to our customers in the traditional way we are moving to a model where we are looking for our customers to subscribe to a service. For this service to be successful it needs to have a good quality product at its heart with value added services wrapped around it." - Robins, Kevin Chief Information Officer

Learn more about the Sage 50cloud options here.

Future Trends

On trends in the accounting profession Jennifer Wawara, EVP of Partners and Alliances at Sage, shares that "the tech trends and challenges in business have been the same" for the last several years " machine learning and AI topics have dated back to the late 1950s… but the time is now!... "