Fintech Labs Insights
Techniques, Trends & Examples
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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Bank Opportunity: Family Accounts
Financial institutions play a long game. Unlike most startups which measure the long-term value of new customers in years or even months, in the digital age, there is no reason why banks can't hold onto customers for multiple generations. If they'd had online banking,...
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Battling the Airline Rewards Cards
Americans love their airline rewards cards. But it's a scale business today, and unless you are American Express (which paid $3B to airline partners last year according to WSJ) or one of the top-5 issuers, you just can't compete for this lucrative, but low-margin...
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Catch Your Banking Customers Doing Something Right
Good leaders, parents and pet owners frequently praise their charges when they are doing things right (even if it was by accident!). We animals love the praise and over time change our behavior for more of it. Psychologists call this positive reinforcement. Financial...
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Fintech Startups: Top 5 Articles of the Week
Here are the top 5 articles this week mentioning fintech startups: Banks and Retailers Are Tracking How You Type, Swipe and Tap (NY Times) To fight fraud, companies are cataloging behavioral biometrics. Few financial institutions will discuss their efforts, but one...
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21 Fintech Startups in the 2018 Inc 500
It's my favorite time of year, no not the dog days of summer, its the publication of the latest Inc 5000 list (the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the United States ranked by ranked by 3-year top-line growth). I've made it through the first 500 and...
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Too Big to Care? The CX Weakness of the Big Banks
The latest CX rankings are in from Forrester and 10 of the 28 banks they reviewed finished with scores in the Good range and 18 were rated OK. No one achieved an Excellent score, but also no one fell into the Poor category. (Note: For an insightful discussion of what...
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Why Does Google Provide Snippet Answers for Subjective Questions?
For several years Google has provided direct answers to straight-forward questions such as, "What time is the World Cup." While that killed traffic to the many sites happy to provide the answer while serving a half-dozen banner ads, the gain in user search experience...
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Marketing UX: Key Bank’s $100 Checking Promotion Landing Page
After I visited Key Bank's website Wednesday, I've been a target of the bank's retargeting campaign. Here's one version displayed on eBay today (there is also a $200 version for Express checking, see the footnote): I clicked on it and it and was transported to the...
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Fintech Podcast of the Day: Jason Pereira’s Fintech Impact
As a non-commuter, I was a latecomer to podcasting. But ever since scoring wireless earbuds last year I've become something of an addict. Podcasts are the perfect accompaniment to solo morning dog walks and other mundane tasks. I mostly listen to shows focusing on...
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The UX at Crowdfunding Platforms
I've long been a fan of crowdfunding, Really, who wouldn't be? On paper it's the perfect culmination of digital finance. Take one budding entrepreneur. Connect her to capital. Change the world. Rinse. Repeat. But like most things money related, when you get to the...
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Top 10 Digital Banking UX Problems: #1 Fostering Financial Insecurity
We look at bank and credit union sites every day. And generally, there is much to like these days. The move to responsive design finally forced financial institutions to declutter their sites and focus on the user. But there is still much room for improvement (see...
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Friday Fail: Good UX Begins with Clear Choices
Let me start by saying that I've been a fan of Umpqua Bank since I saw then-CEO Ray Davis present his pioneering branch designs at BAI Retail Banking in the mid-1990s. And that's saying a lot, because I am no fan of the bank branch. The other day I visited Umpqua Bank...
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