Featured Startups
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Mobile UI: Don’t Ignore Mobile Banking Security Perceptions
Is Mobile Banking Secure? Last week, I was surprised to see the Wall Street Journal run a nearly full-page piece entitled, Is Mobile Banking Secure? . It was in a special Personal Finance section included in Monday's print and online editions. The Q&A was with two...
Friday Fun: St. Mary Bank’s Celtics Tickets Sweepstakes
I'm a complete sucker for online sweepstakes. I haven't won anything since 1996 when the competition was one-thousandth of what it is today. But like a dog looking for another handout, that hasn't stopped me from trying. Today, I spotted a smart mini-sweeps at St....
Battling Negative Perceptions of Credit Union* Tech Prowess
Last week I traveled to the center of the U.S. credit union universe last week, CUNA's GAC conference in Washington DC. We were there to tout the launch of our BUX Certified digital banking program and spent three days talking digital with visitors to the Tyfone booth...
Security UX: Suspicious Activity Feedback Loop
Digital channels are a huge help in thwarting fraudulent charges. In the old days, as recently as 5 or 6 years ago) the best you could hope when your card number was compromised was a cryptic voice message left on your landline phone. And that introduced a reporting...
How Star One Credit Union Became the First BUX-Certified Financial Institution in the World
Star One Credit Union is in an enviable position. Its Sunnyvale location, smack dab in the heart of Silicon Valley, gives the credit union access to many of the wealthiest people in the world. As a result, it has grown to be the tenth largest credit union in the...
Customer Service UX: Bank of America Encourages Social Media Direct Messages
Bank of America's website and mobile apps are generally a showcase of best practices. The bank spends millions each year ensuring pixel perfect UI. But no one is perfect. Looking at its Contact Us page today (screenshot above), we were glad to see options to reach out...
