<story><title>Startup says it wants to fight poverty, but a food stamp giant is blocking it</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/technology/start-up-fight-poverty-food-stamp-giant-blocking-it.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hamandcheese</author><text>I’ve had the pleasure of doing some contract work that involved dealings with Conduent, and my oh my are they absolutely horrible to work with, and generally incompetent.&lt;p&gt;Their m.o. is to put you on the phone with some folks from Bangalore, where if you ask anything off script they stonewall you with “that’s against internal security policy.”&lt;p&gt;Then, because the project is 6 months delayed and the main stakeholders are upset (the ones paying $$$ of taxpayer money), some account manager there CC’s every living soul who has ever been involved and tries to get them all on the phone together, which goes about as well as you would expect. Promises get made, timelines agreed upon, and then they never deliver.</text></comment>
<story><title>Startup says it wants to fight poverty, but a food stamp giant is blocking it</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/technology/start-up-fight-poverty-food-stamp-giant-blocking-it.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>utopkara</author><text>Many will only read the image captions and will miss this buried &amp;quot;info&amp;quot; bit:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Conduent, in another twist, has begun competing with the start-up. The business services outsourcer, which has $6 billion in yearly revenue, introduced its own smartphone app last year. Conduent’s entry, ConnectEBT, has significantly fewer reviews and lower ratings on the Google and Apple app stores than Propel’s FreshEBT.&amp;quot;</text></comment>