Fincons Group, a leading IT business consultancy, continues to be the Associated Press’ choice as the new flexible distribution platform, the Product and Price Console (PPC) which launched at the start of the year, begins to provide results and shows additional scope for potential. The solution was developed specifically to respond to AP’s content distribution transformation objective of addressing evolving market demand with a more flexible pricing model. The requirement was to create a platform that enabled AP’s sales teams to bundle or unbundle product, improve product definition, and define specific pricing tools to match different customer needs.
AP selected Fincons Group for this project because of its proven track-record in the Media industry where they have delivered various high-profile innovative projects. The solution was launched in January 2019 and initially tested on a limited client range. Now, in July, the platform is already showing its potential and AP is considering extending the range it currently is applied to.
In particular, the solution is living up to the promise of helping transform the AP’s content distribution model by making it more flexible and suited to modern news fruition patterns. Smaller clients that were looking for on demand, customised or à la carte product bundles for example, were previously difficult to target with a fixed pricing and product model that was originally developed with large corporates that typically purchase huge volumes of content in mind.
Fincons Group designed the platform tailoring it to the AP’s evolving business model but continues to play a key role developing and upgrading the tool based on the client’s changing needs and the market. Specifically, the AP plan is to add new capabilities to this tool such as AI-powered ‘recommendation’ features, based on content usage information, to offer clients more value. Understanding trends more accurately and enabling more timely reaction are just a couple of objectives that the AP is thinking about to assist sales activities.
Both AP’s product and sales teams, that respectively use the product configuration and product pricing aspects of the tool, are already starting to get a feel of the usefulness and potential of the platform. In particular, the sales team are excited about its capacity and are pleased with the initial results provided.
Francesco Moretti, Deputy CEO Fincons Group and CEO Fincons.US, comments: “We are delighted that the custom-designed platform we developed for the AP as part of their business transformation strategy is already living up to its promise and bearing the first fruits. In all our projects we are committed to working flexibly side by side with our clients to meet all their demands and requirements and hearing that we have responded to these optimally is our greatest achievement. To ensure we deliver this level of service we continuously invest in ad hoc development and technology scouting to ensure we provide best-of-breed solutions that really fit their specific strategic needs.”
Gianluca D’Aniello, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at The Associated Press, says: “We were not interested in simply augmenting out developer capacity, what we needed was real vertical expertise in the media sector that could help us design a completely different offer and help us address new customer segments in different ways - we found that in Fincons. In particular, Fincons helped us achieve additional flexibility in our strategy which we think will be a key to success as we continue to refine the tool to respond to our needs and those of the evolving market.”
Francesco Moretti and Gianluca D’Aniello will be presenting the initial results of this exciting new venture at IBC on Saturday 14th at 12.30 at the CE HUB, Hall 14.
www.finconsgroup.com
www.ap.org
