Govtech startups – companies aiming to change how the government provides basic services with the introduction of new technology tools – are hard work. The public sector has an aura surrounding it of excessive red tape, lack of competitive forces, outdated technology, and long-drawn budget processes.
That being said, experts concur that innovation in government is indeed possible – and if one Chicago startup offers any clue, an entrepreneur who understands how government works and is willing to operate both strategically and patiently can certainly make a difference.
Mike Duffy is the founder and CEO of CityBase, a technology company hoping to make citizen-government interactions more personalized and responsive. Its current offering includes a mobile, web and kiosk platform that allows citizens to make government payments, as well as access general services like property searches and permit applications. Moreover, CityBase also analyzes data from its platforms, empowering governments to directly tailor communication with individual residents.
One potential application for CityBase is parking tickets. The startup wants to give government agencies a more user friendly way for residents to pay their fines, with the idea that an easier-to-navigate website will result in more bills paid. Another application is to make the process for obtaining business permits more efficient, giving new companies access to the online tools they need to start their ventures.
"Currently, citizens have to deal with static PDFs, unresponsive mobile websites, or read long legal terminology in order to complete simple civic tasks. Additionally, while we as citizens may have dealt with the city's sanitation department (for example), often our information is not stored or transferred seamlessly to other departments should we have to deal with them in the future – even if they are under the same administration," said Duffy in an interview with Chicago Inno. "CityBase is leveraging cloud computing and personal technology to unify the experience that individual departments are already providing, making this digital relationship between government and citizen more accessible and intuitive for both parties involved."
CityBase is now working with over 50 local government agencies nationwide. While it declined to name specific clients, the company has installed some pilot payment kiosks across Chicago to test how users interact with the devices.
The company is intentionally choosing to operate only at a local level at this time. It looks at city governments as a collection of semi-autonomous agencies, each with their own software-as-a-service model as a way to interact with citizens. "As a socially conscious company, we believe that working with local administrations and city governments presents a tremendous opportunity for impact on the lives of citizens," said Duffy.
CityBase has raised about $12.5 million in two rounds of funding, having grown to about 50 employees who are mostly focused on user experience research, development and implementation. It is on track to double that number by the end of 2017, having just moved into brand new offices in the Loop which can accommodate its growth.
Duffy, an engineering and MBA grad from Purdue and Booth respectively, started his career as a Federal Reserve Analyst at Northern Trust, spending twelve years in capital markets and landing at the securities lending desk right at the onset of the housing bubble in 2007. He started gaining an interest in understanding how large urban areas are organized organically, and subsequent exploration of behavioral economics – or the psychology of decision-making – led to him to identify the opportunity in CityBase.
“At its core, CityBase is guided by cognitive empathy. If empathy is understanding someone’s feelings, cognitive empathy is understanding their perspectives, in order to anticipate how they will make decisions. Combined with the FOGG behavior model, this means that our platform is designed to ensure more people pay their bills, more quickly," he concluded.
