Nowadays, beyond technology, search engines, forums and all the information available online, it becomes harder and harder for people to navigate the rules, regulations and recommendations they can get online. To middle class and upper-middle-class people, the need to benefit from bits of advice from a family doctor, a lawyer and an accountant is obvious.
Hopefully, I don’t need to explain to you the benefit of having a family doctor who knows your personal history and the possible implications of any new treatment you might be unfortunate enough to need. It’s even better if the family doctor also knows your family history and why not, even your genetic background. I can also tell you that from a medium level income upwards, the more you are trying to accomplish, the more you feel the need to have a lawyer represent you or at least guard your interests when it comes to various contracts. Last but not least, we all benefit from financial advisers and accountants that can help us with our tax returns, if not even more.
If you agree with the above, would you agree that it would be convenient to get all these services from one place when you need them? Even further, what if you could get all three types of services from people who are aware of your medical condition, the contracts, laws and regulations you are bound to, your financial situation and the risks you expose yourself to?
Think for a moment of how private banking institutions provide a complete financial strategy for ultra net worth individuals, families and businesses. I’m proposing a platform business model that would democratize these services while extending them, enabling the professionals delivering the services to benefit from the latest technologies and further increase their expertise.
The Trinity idea relies on the following platform business model to accomplish this:
- Owner: The platform provider – in our case Trinity;
- Provider: A personal computer or mobile phone as an interface to the platform. In the future, the platform can integrate with digital personal assistants, but it might take a while until this trend reaches mainstream adoption.
- Producers: family doctors, lawyers and accountants, as well as entities formed from at least a member of these 3 professions;
- Consumers: normal people like you and me.
Trinity, for lack of a better name, would provide multiple subscription services through which the consumers would be able to benefit from the services offered by the Producers: lawyers, accountants and family doctors. Several packages are offered to consumers. For now, I will name them Silver, Gold and Platinium.
- Silver would work as an on-demand service where you pay every time you consume the service.
- Gold would be a subscription service that would allow you access to a trinity formed by a family doctor, a lawyer and an accountant. They will work together and have access to your data.
- Platinum would come with multiple services delivered by several highly specialized people that create advanced services. Think of it as a law firm, an accounting firm and a hospital all working together for you.
There might be other pricing strategies and bundling options that make more sense. A careful analysis of the possible customer segments could highlight them.
I do believe that anyone would agree that more supply would drive more demand. And the possible benefits of such a platform look obvious, at least to me. Even more, anonymizing the data and further machine learning it for various business cases can further reinforce the competitive advantage of the platform provider, as long as the users agree to share their data in an anonymized way. If you need a deeper analysis of these topics, let me know. As for the technical aspects, I would not go and create a high-level solution design, as a knowledgeable solution architect would have no problem in doing that.
I want you to ask yourself the following question: What if family doctors, lawyers and accountants would benefit from large sets of data and machine learning solutions to further scale up or increase what they can deliver? Asking the platform provider: What can you do to help the Producers to be more effective? Leeds to the same answer:
- Many lawyers would benefit from the legal tech. They could further scale their deliverables by utilizing AI solutions to perform legal research. Companies such as LexisNexis or Westlaw already do this. E-discovery is also a topic to be explored. Since we live in a more and more globalized and interconnected world, automated translations are a necessity. Speech to text and perhaps Text to Speach solutions have multiple real-life implementations, legal tech too.
- Artificial Intelligence can help accountants too. It can enable them to save time by automating multiple processes, reducing errors and producing business insights. Audit and compliance are good candidates for automation. AI can identify potentially fraudulent transactions if the end-users are victims of them for big accounts.
- Family doctors can use AI solutions to achieve productivity gains or augment and improve their practice. Integrating the solutions with other health care digital startups opens up the possibilities even further.
I believe I’ve made my case of how AI solutions would help the Producers. Multiple other AI applications are not listed above. A deep dive into these topics is not within the scope of this blog post.
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of business models where I am the product generating data that further feeds the AI and ML models of the platform providers, which use them only to increase their direct or indirect sales to me. It’s time to put data scientists and ML at work for the people. Perhaps, having it work for people that help other people is the intermediary step to accomplish this.
As you can see, Trinity would be able to help both the providers and the consumers, increasing the interactions between them and further driving the demand.
When it comes to monetization, my gut feeling says that consumers should pay a fair price for the services, but they should not pay a fee to the platform provider. In some countries, compulsory insurance covers the fee of the family doctors. In others, it doesn’t. Still, all these details can be addressed with due diligence. In my view, the producers should bear the cost of the platform, paying a small fee on their earnings on it. Of course, if they benefit from advanced AI solutions and tools additional fees might occur, though a fair amount of some of them provided for free could drive adoption.
With the risk of overselling a few engineers I know, I believe a POC for Trinity can be built in less than three months and an MVP in six. I would bet that with a good marketing approach, the entire project can be profitable within a year, and from the 3rd year onwards, it would fight hard not to be acquired by big players.
What do you think?