Fintech Labs Insights
Techniques, Trends & Examples
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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
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,...
read more
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...
read more
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,...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more
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...
read more