BillGuard

» see billguard.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

BillGuard started in 2010 with a premise that sounds obvious now and did not then: the reason you cannot tell whether a charge on your card is a scam is that you are looking at it alone. Somewhere out there another cardholder has already found the same twelve dollar line item and written an angry paragraph about the merchant on a forum. Yaron Samid and Raphael Ouzan built a company around collecting those paragraphs.

The engine scraped complaints and merchant descriptors from across the web, then matched them against the transactions in your linked accounts and pushed the suspicious ones up for a yes or no. Users flagged what was wrong, and every flag made the next person's scan better. The company had a name for the category it was chasing, grey charges, meaning the things that are not quite fraud: a trial that silently converted, or a fee under a merchant name matching nothing you remember buying.

Money followed quickly. A $3 million seed from Bessemer and Founder Collective and others, then $10 million more in 2011 with Khosla Ventures and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors in the round. The iPhone app arrived in July 2013 and Android in May 2014, and by that October BillGuard had flagged over $60 million in suspect charges out of about a billion dollars it was watching.

~ the case file ~

~ the crowd as a fraud detector ~

The interesting claim BillGuard made was that fraud detection had been left to the banks for no better reason than habit. Banks see the transaction but not the annoyance; you see the annoyance but not the pattern. Pooling the second thing across a million statements gave you something the issuers' own systems were not built to notice, which was the slow gray zone rather than the stolen-card spike.

From Ankara this read as a solution to a problem shaped differently. Turkish cards had come with an SMS for every single transaction long before American ones did, so the unrecognized charge tended to announce itself in your pocket within the minute rather than hide in a monthly statement you did not read. I never had a reason to want this app. I did think it was one of the better ideas of that fintech wave, and it lasted seven years.

~ the rename ~

Prosper Marketplace, the peer-to-peer lender, bought BillGuard in September 2015 for a reported $30 million. For a while that looked like the good ending. Prosper had lending on one side and now a consumer app with real daily use on the other, and in March 2016 it relaunched the whole thing as Prosper Daily, with credit score tracking and identity monitoring bolted onto the original fraud scan.

Then online lending had a bad 2016, and after Prosper cut staff the consumer app became the part of the company that did not obviously make money. On Friday 28 July 2017 Prosper told users the app was going away on 31 August. Billing stopped on 31 July and annual subscribers got prorated refunds within ten business days, which is a tidier exit than most apps manage.

~ where the users went ~

Prosper pointed everybody at Clarity Money, a rival budgeting app that did roughly the same subscription-hunting job. Goldman Sachs bought Clarity Money the following spring and eventually folded it into Marcus, so the recommended replacement outlived BillGuard by a few years and then dissolved into a bank as well.

The idea did not die with either of them. Every banking app now flags a duplicate charge or a subscription you forgot, and the flagging is free because it is a retention feature rather than a product. That is the shape of BillGuard's whole afterlife: the feature won, the company that proved it was worth building did not.

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