Air, an Italian consumer service business, sits at the intersection between info mobility players, e-payment gateways, car dealers, predictive maintenance and telemetry providers, car makers, and the insurance industry. Their smart driving apps make owning a car easier, less expensive, and more enjoyable with services including those that help protect vehicles from theft, optimize vehicle usage, manage fuel consumption, and, most recently, offer low insurance premiums.

According to Air CEO Igor Valandro, “Our goal is to create an insurance product based on a “pay-how-you-drive” idea. We’re looking to take Air from a telematics service provider to being the first Italian insurer offering this innovative service.” Air sees themselves “as an ecosystem enabler…taking old business models and innovating upon them to disrupt the digital insurance market.”

With this planned shift into the insurance market—and more services, integrations, and features on the way—Air needed a system that could help them sell and manage all of their services on a recurring basis.

Before Zuora, Air was having difficulty managing their own billing internally. Besides wanting to improve and simplify the billing process, they also needed help managing the full subscription lifecycle of their customers.

Zuora was brought on board to support Air’s growth strategy and help Air to gain a better understanding of their real revenue. According to Valandro, Air also chose Zuora as a partner “to expand our market, easily managing all new products, services, prices, and discounts according to our customers’ and partners’ needs.”

With a goal to 15X their customer base in a year’s time, Air knew they needed the right strategic partner. The first stage of their strategy is to launch connected services, monetize their customer base, and then branch out to launch insurance services (in partnership with Axa). In stage two, they plan to move more solidly into the direct B2C space.

Since implementing Zuora, Air has had a much easier time managing their billing and has already seen revenue growth. In Valandro’s view, “it’s a topic of deployment. We were able to implement a new business model while reducing by half the time of our development. This will definitely have an impact on the commercial side.”

Zuora also supports Air’s broad product catalogue with a wide variety of services and rate plans. And Air uses Zuora reporting to measure their business and “better understand and satisfy the needs of our customers,” according to Valandro.

International expansion is a real focus for Air as well. They already have a new office in San Francisco to manage and expand their business. With global payments, agile pricing in different currencies, and more, Zuora offers the functionality that Air needs to become a successful global business. As Valandro notes, “Zuora strategically will allow us to scale up in other countries without having bureaucratic problems.”

In short, according to Valandro, “Zuora is the best platform for the Subscription Economy. Zuora allows us to shape our business model around our customer, around their real needs.”