Fintech Labs Insights
Techniques, Trends & Examples
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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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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