Interview with Matteo Preziotti, CEO of EasyPol

Interview with Matteo Preziotti, CEO of EasyPol, a digital payment service aimed at public administration matters.

The innovation represented by digital payments still finds some resistance in Italy, and this is where EasyPol’s challenge begins: the goal is to promote the development of digital payments in Italy, since our country registers a severe below average use of said method in Europe.

The company – which has already partnered with important institutional and private agencies – has two main goals that will lead to a revolution in the online payment sector: simplifying the citizen-public administration relationship, and supporting the citizens in their uniform management of finances.

This is how EasyPol’s platform looks like:

A simple, intuitive and clear interface will guide users through the following operations:

• Monitoring your financial situation: add cards and bank accounts to EasyPol in order to monitor your financial situation in real time, send bank transfers and view aggregate data;  
• Making payments destined to the public administration: pay stamps, bulletins, MAV and RAV, receive PagoPa notices and much more;
• Making payments without signing in in 37 seconds: pay safely and quickly for any service without the need of SPID or an account;
• Categorizing your operations: EasyPol always grants you full control over your expenses.

This is a service projected into the future: EasyPol is the first service to make the digital financial experience in Italy easier!

Hello Matteo, nice to meet you, and thank you for your time. “EasyPol, the service for simplifying the digital financial experience in Italy”: can you tell us something about it?

Thank you for this opportunity! EasyPol is a service that allows you to pay PagoPa notices, postal bulletins, MAV and RAV through your mobile device in an easy, fast and secure way. Following our success with digital payments, we’re going to launch EasyPol Banking very soon: it’s a new service integral to the app that can link together many bank accounts and cards, which allows users to use lots of new features that can help them manage their finances better. We finally have an intuitive and simple interface that can single-handedly manage all of the user’s bank accounts and cards without the need of other separate bank apps.

How was the idea of EasyPol born?

It happened by chance in 2017. I was sitting on the sofa, after a tiring day at work; I glanced over to the pile of fines that were due to be paid on the table, and I thought to myself: “Why can’t I pay all of these fines immediately, from my phone, without having to go out?”. That’s when – after spending a lot of time researching, developing and working as a team – we created EasyPol, an easy-to-use, fast and secure service for digital payments.

How long did it take for the project to take shape? 

About 24 months of incredible effort from the whole team!

Digital payment records in Italy are still pretty disappointing. Why is that? And how can your service meet the “not-so-young” users’ needs?

According to ISTAT data, us Italians spend an average of 16 days a year in line at the ASL, the Bank or any other public office. We waste a lot of precious time! This might be due to cultural reasons, but there’s also the fact that digital payment tools still perform poorly in the user-friendliness department. EasyPol is working towards filling this gap. Indeed, one of its main pros is that you can make payments without even signing in. Furthermore, thanks to the PSD2 EU directive there’s a major push toward Open Banking. This improvement in the fintech world is beneficial for EasyPol: there’s the opportunity of creating financial services that specifically cater to the citizen’s needs.

What is your target audience, and what about the feedback you’ve been receiving so far?

We are targeted at citizens who wish for an easy-to-use, fast and secure service that can make bureaucracy more efficient.

We noticed the existence of a crowdfunding project on MamaCrowd: can you tell our readers about it, and also how to become associates?

Crowdfunding equity involves a “collective” and “from the masses” financial process. We chose this method to finance EasyPol Banking because we aimed at a service with a strong social impact. Our mission has always been to facilitate the digitization process of the public administration and to improve the citizen-bureaucracy relationship. Getting the citizens involved with EasyPol’s investment was the natural thing to do, because the masses have the power of triggering this change. The “crowd” gives us useful suggestions and information to improve our project. EasyPol is, therefore, a citizen-based service: EasyPol speaks for all of us, who wish for a more efficient, digitized and less-wasteful country.

How is digital financial education doing in Italy nowadays?

Technology is always evolving, and successful adaptation to innovation is never easy to achieve. It’s the same for digital finance: it’s not just a phase, it’s the future, but things are moving fast and making users feel disoriented. This is especially true when there’s money and sensitive data on the line! EasyPol’s mission is to simplify, raise awareness and educate people about how to manage their money, so that they can set substantial goals for themselves. “Optimization” is our keyword. We don’t often have the entirety of our financial situation figured out, because we tend to use a variety of bank accounts and cards that are scattered around different apps. EasyPol solves this issue by linking these things together: a single app will show users their financial data as a whole, and many different features can be employed in order to manage finances optimally. Also, more often than not, we let banking institutions handle our data for marketing purposes. But what if we used our data in a way that’s beneficial for us ourselves? Our selling point is a financial learning algorithm based on comparable, behavioral and transactional data. It can calculate an accurate and dynamic credit score value that benefits the user who’s interested in forms of financing. By doing so, this system gives users a more accurate overview of their financial situation that makes them have access to their credit more freely. Everything is achieved by following the very strict security standards imposed by our partnerships with the banks themselves, meaning that we abide by the European general data protection regulation. EasyPol always puts the citizen’s data security first.

Credits: 

https://easypol.io/