Ep #152: Payment Plans and Membership Solutions with SmilePass

You are listening to the Julie Parker Practice Success podcast where you discover management insights and strategies for your successful dental practice. There are also interviewers with key people in the industry who have advice and services to help you and your team achieve great success.

Welcome to this episode of the Julie Parker Practice Success podcast and today I've been co-hosted with the wonderful Amina Bersille. How are you Amina? Hi, Julie. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for joining us. So it's a bit of more of a digital business mastery podcast episode and we've got to make magnificent guests and company to speak about today. And that is SmilePass. And our guest from SmilePass is Marcius Bispo. How are you? Hi, I'm good. Thanks for having me here.

It was an easy thing to have you on this podcast because Amina and I are so excited about smile pass and what it means to dental practices. And so we are encouraging every dental practice to look into it because it is fantastic. So first of all, tell us a little bit about UMass, your background, and then tell us a little bit about smile pass and what it,

how long it's been around and what it actually does. I'm going to throw it to you. Sure. Okay. So I am originally from Brazil. I came here to Australia in 2018, and I started master degree in business. And at the same time, I was working in dental practice as the business manager of the practice. I have some experience in dentistry from Brazil. We started some different,

some mobile dental practice there and other business not related to dentistry. So on this practice that I was working here, one of my goals was to increase the revenue and to turn the clinic more profitable. But we saw there were so many challenges there. And one of the challenges was the conversion rate, the treatment conversion rate of the clinic. And

we tried different things. One of the things that really worked and it was we created a membership for our patients there. And in the beginning, we were, it was just the idea was how we can make more affordable, the preventative care more affordable for people and more convenient, because it was not only about the cost, it was also about the convenience of the patient

to remember and to feel motivated to go to the to the to the clinics. So that was the first, when we created the membership was, this was the goal, but there was so, it was so much more than we were expecting

that in just six months, we had already 60 members using our membership of the clinic. And those members, they started to invite other friends and family to participate on that.

And we saw new patients coming from a different channel that we were not expecting. But soon it started to be a burden to us because we were not ready to,

we didn't have a platform to manage those patients. We were using a spreadsheet at that time and it soon started to be a problem. Then we started to talk with other companies

that manage memberships, but not for dental practice. We talked with a few, one of the ones that eats more for the gyms

because it's a similar approach, a gym membership and what we were doing, but not perfect. So we use this platform for two years on the practice,

but soon we saw that this was not the ideal part. We were having, we had at that time, 300 members and growing. So we started to develop our own platform.

We hired a great team of developers to do this platform. The chief technology officer, the CTO of the platform. He is not only a data scientist and developer,

but he's also a dentist. So he understands the field very well. knows the needs and he brought so many sites to the product. So that was when SmallPass was finally created and SmallPass is a platform that manages payments,

not only memberships. The membership was the first part of that. It is our big success, but we also offer different payment options for the practice and for the patient.

idea is to concentrate in just one platform, everything that's related to payment, to increase the revenue of the dental practice, and also to facilitate the process to make dentistry more affordable and convenient for the patients. So inside Small Pass, we have memberships, the practice can create their own membership

plans, they can create their own in-house payment plans, they can use instant payments to send, for example, payments to the patients, send an SMS to the patient and the patient can put the payment details to send to them. We have gift cards, we have third parties, dental loans, for example, dental care and

other platforms, other systems. Instead of making one contract with each of those dental loans, you can use Malpass and have access to these fields. And we are always growing and investing new technology. So there are so many other things to come. And I'm very excited with the new products.

It's just so powerful. There really is those two prongs. And I'll go through to you, Mini. We've got both the membership side, which we're going to talk about. And we're also going to be talking about the payment plan side. Because how complex is it nowadays for dental receptionists and if that receptionist, God forbid, isn't there to organise the payment plan for that

patient, for somebody that doesn't normally do it, all of a sudden to try to learn the denture care, arc to pay, zip, practice payment plans, all the things, it's so complex and it's difficult to implement so it doesn't often work well. That's right, it does get really messy and I think even for the patient, for them to be able to understand when there's so many

things happening in different areas. And there's already a sense of distrust around dentistry and its fees. And then we make this side of it so complicated, they're really like scared of it. And having it streamlined in the one hub is, I think, a really beautiful thing. And another thing is that I've just always seen this big need to move in this

direction. I think even 15 years ago, maybe around that kind of time, there was another