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Originally Posted On: https://medium.com/@trustusapp/trustus-disrupting-the-30-billion-fertility-industry-with-fintech-fe31fa624fab
Key Points:
· Both Global and US Birth Rates have been declining rapidly.
· The Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) are rising explosively.
· Surrogacy and Egg Donation processes are complex to manage.
· Technologies are merely adopted among Health and Legal industries.
· TrustUS enables both industries with payment automation.
The Rise of Third-Party Reproduction and the Lack of Trust/Escrow Management Tools
One in eight couples, single parents by choice and a large number of the LGBTQ+ population in the U.S. seek out Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) services. ART is a multibillion-dollar industry with a market size of over $20 billion. The market size of this industry is expected to go past $30 billion by 2027. This rapid growth is mainly due to the increasing demand for services offered by this industry.
Celebrities and business owners have voiced their concerns about low birth rates.
Among the explosive growth of ART services in recent years, Third-party Reproduction, which includes Gestational Surrogacy and Egg Donation, has risen even more rapidly. A gestational carrier (also called a gestational surrogate) is a woman who agrees to carry a developing embryo created from another woman’s egg. Over the last decade, the number of embryo transfers for ART cycles that used gestational carriers increased, from 2,649 in 2010 to 9,195 in 2019. The percentage of transfers using a gestational carrier among all ART cycles also increased, from 2.1% of all ART cycles in 2010 to 5.4% in 2019; The demand for egg donation also skyrocketed due to various reasons: Delayed mating, LGBTQ+, and single parents by choice. The number of cycles performed using donor eggs or embryos (fresh or frozen) increased from 18,011 in 2010 to 27,131 in 2019.
2019 Fertility Clinic and National Summary Report, CDC
However, the promised land of surrogacy and egg donation does not always guarantee smooth sails. Support systems can prove scarce, fertility services can make patients feel adrift, mental health support is rare, patient education is abysmal, and costs are obfuscated; the list goes on and on. But one of the most prominent issues that come with surrogacy and egg donation, the two combined are also called Third Party Reproduction, is the fund management.
A typical surrogacy contract has more than 50 pages including the detailed exhibit of more than a dozen sorts of compensation and allowance throughout the surrogacy journey. A typical cost of Surrogacy is between $100,000 and $140,000, and it’s growing day by day as the demand surges. The burden and responsibilities of managing a third-party trust/escrow account usually fall on the Intended Parents’ attorneys. However, handling payment requests, coordinating and arbitrating, accounting, auditing and reconciliation, and specific vertical know-how requirement means the law firm need to assemble a special team that dedicate to fertility trust/escrow account management. With many of those fertility attorneys are small businesses and are slow to adopt financial technologies, errors and omissions often occur, and result in financial losses for the parties involved.
Entering TrustUS: a Modern Fintech Solution that Automates the Payment Management and Integrate Seamlessly with Any Bank
TrustUS is a cross-platform SaaS that provides trust/escrow account automation
TrustUS is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that shifts the trust account management on autopilot mode. It is cloud-based, cross-platform (Web, iOS and Android), modernly and responsively designed to provide the end users with the best and friendliest experience.
· Integrate seamlessly with any bank: with our powerful streamlined solution that connects with more than 12,000 financial institutions. Your existing trust accounts can be easily plugged into our system and are ready to send or receive funds.
Integrate seamlessly with any bank
· Escalated payment request and approval process: specifically tailored and categorized for surrogacy and egg donation journeys, along with soon-to-be-added receipt optical character recognition and parsing functionality, we make disbursement request and approval a breeze.
Escalated payment request and approval process
· End-to-end encrypted instant messaging and file transferring: send in-app messages and files instantaneously and securely. You are automatically assigned to the case groups that you belong to, so you don’t miss any important messages.
End-to-end encrypted instant messaging and file transferring
· Schedule one-time or recurring payments: once the banking credential gets authenticated, the ACH payment scheduling and disbursing is only one click away. You can also customize the recurring payment events. The payment status can be easily tracked, and each party will be notified for every status change.
· Sophisticated case and ledger management: Understanding that the surrogacy and egg donation journeys are lengthy, complex, and not cut-and-dry, the case and ledger management functions are designed to be flexible. Whether it’s replacing the carrier or switching to another agency, the changes can be easily achieved with no hassles. The agencies can record any advanced spending made prior to the opening of the trust/escrow account and convert them into requests with a few clicks once the account is established.
Sophisticated case and ledger management
· Third-party vendor management and payment: As many disbursements are meant to be made to third-party vendors, for instance, the health insurance premium, a vendor management component is designed to seamlessly manage the vendor profiles and fund disbursements.
What’s Next?
With solid engineering, sleek user interface design, and the ease-of-use experience, we position ourselves as the technological disrupter in the Third-party Reproduction trust/escrow account management space. However, a solid tech stack doesn’t mean we will stop here. Our team is already wrapping up the iOS and Android app unit testing, functions like multi-language support, Zappier integration, and document management are well planned and iterated as this article is written. You may check our humble but ambitious roadmap here: TrustUS Roadmap | Trello