Fintech Labs Insights
Techniques, Trends & Examples
Student Loan Repayments as a Service
Yesterday, one of my favorite recent YC grads (Summer 2018) Goodly, announced its $1.6 million seed round with participation from Norwest Venture Partners (which has historically been affiliated with Wells Fargo, which acquired its parent bank back in the 1990s). And...
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American Express 2.0? First Look at Brex, Fintech’s Youngest Unicorn
Most banks wouldn't hire a 22-year college dropout to be a teller, let alone give them product responsibility. Yet, a pair of 22-year-olds have built a brand worth more than $1 billion. Even more amazing, it's not a consumer or social play, it's good old B2B and in...
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Credit UX: Starter Loans from Self Lender
Since the financial crisis in 2008, it's been much harder for U.S. youth to obtain a credit card. So most rely on debit cards for spending. However, debit cards don't help in establishing credit for the estimated 45 million American adults without a credit score (see...
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Pricing UX: Down with Fees, Up with Subscriptions
Most consumer banking research finds that "high fees" are one of three or four primary reasons to close an account. But what does that mean? Is it transaction fees at the ATM? Monthly checking account fees? Or penalty fees from overdrafting? I suspect it's often the...
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Penalty Fee UX: Bank of the West Formalizes the OD Mulligan*
Many customers know they can get at least one overdraft fee waived by appealing to customer service or the branch manager. But it's not a good experience. Driving to a branch or calling an 800 number and sucking up to some stranger that you hope isn't having a bad...
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Feature Friday: December Skip-a-Payment
I've always liked the (mostly) credit union tradition of allowing members to skip a loan payment, especially in December. It's a win-win. Members get financial relief during a time of increased spending and the financial institution creates goodwill and increased loan...
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Hey Erica, Should a Bank Name its Chatbot?
Bank of America's email last week introducing its chatbot Erica made me wince (see above). And I wondered why. I crave self-service in all transactions, so I am pleased that banks are using AI/ML/DL, or most likely, just common sense, to solve my problems without...
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Youth Banking: BECU Boosts Savings APY for Kids Under 18
When my kids were young (early 2000's), there was a lot more incentive to save. I remember setting up their first savings accounts at ING Direct when the direct bank touted its 5% APY in bold orange advertising all over the east coast (see below). Even with low...
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Banking Opportunity: Fraud Prevention Services
Most (all?) consumer banking services are commodities. That's why banks continue to spend billions on an otherwise superfluous branch network. But instead of spending tens of millions on branches, why not invest a fraction of that in services that actually...
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Fast Company Recognizes 9 Financial Companies in its Design Competition
Fast Company named 398 winners and honorees in its annual Innovation by Design competition across all industries. A panel of expert judges chose the winners from among 3,000 applicants. As you can imagine, financial services are not generally at the forefront of...
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Investing UX: Scalable Capital’s Time Machine
Generally, I'm against cute financial product names. Does adding "Blue Ribbon" to your checking account really help it sell better? Or does it just add a layer of noise, costing you lost business in the end? Unless you can run an A/B test to prove it one way or...
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11 Ways to Improve Account Opening & Digital Onboarding Experience (UX)
Last week, we told you that we were open sourcing our 400+ UX guidelines starting with the digital account opening process. Today, we bring you a slice of those best-practice guidelines with our favorite 11: Make it easy to find your "Open an Account" button It's so...
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Banking in the Age of Tokenized Assets (or Tokens are Eating the World’s Assets)
Marc Andreessen famously explained "Why software is eating the world" seven years ago in the Wall Street Journal. Along the same lines, it's becoming clear that "Security tokens are eating the world's assets" (though that doesn't have quite the same ring to it). While...
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Open Banking UX Initiative
The open source movement has had a profound impact on software development. There are millions of open source codebases available on Github where its audience of 30 million developers can access, review, collaborate and build better code together. In that same spirit,...
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Crowdfunding Portals at Banks & Credit Unions
In the United States, equity or debt crowdfunding, especially to non-accredited investors, is still just a sliver of overall private-company fundraising. In its first full year (2017), so-called Reg CF activity, equity crowdfunding from non-accredited investors raised...
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