Joel Lieginger of Paceline On The Future of Money and Banking
An Interview With Jason Hartman
The way we bank has changed dramatically over the last decade. It was not too long ago when you had to wait in line in a bank to deposit money. Today things are totally different. You can do your banking without ever walking into a bank. In addition, the whole concept of money has changed. In the recent past, money usually meant bills and coins. But today, the concept of money has expanded to include digital currency and NFTs. What other innovations should we expect to see in banking in the short and medium term?
To address this, we are talking to leaders in the banking, finance, and fintech worlds, to discuss the future of banking and money over the next few years. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Lieginger.
After 15 years in the financial services industry, at some of the most storied organizations (AIG and AIA), and in some of the most senior roles, Joel Lieginger saw firsthand how the financial services world needed to change for the next generation. And with fintech being the next big thing in tech — but being entirely tech led, rather than financial services led and tech enabled — he left his big corporate gig, moved his family across the world to the SF Bay Area, and founded Paceline, the first-ever fitness rewards platform that adds financial benefit to your physical activity.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started in this industry?
After nearly 20 years as a global leader at the crossroads of financial services, life insurance, and technology, I saw firsthand how these industries could intersect and change for next-gen consumers in a way that could have real global and social impact.
Prior to Paceline, I held numerous positions at AIA, one of the world’s top insurance companies based in Hong Kong, leading their post-IPO strategy and running the company’s multi-billion dollar bancassurance relationship with Citibank. Before that, I led AIG’s international strategy and marketing & distribution in Japan.
In 2019, I left my big corporate gig to launch Paceline — the first-ever fitness rewards platform that adds financial benefit to your physical activity ; and now live in the Bay Area with my wife, three kids and two dogs.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
One of the most pivotal, ah-ha moments in my career inspired Paceline. My corporate career was moving at break-neck pace; my wife and I had three kids in less than three years and, like for so many people, my health and wellness fell by the wayside. When I finally got back to exercising, it was so clear: your health is your most valuable asset and the foundation for how everything else functions. So, why aren’t we rewarding people for pursuing their wellbeing and for living a healthier, better, and longer life?
Ok wonderful. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
With our rewards app and credit card, Paceline is the unified wellness platform that connects your health and your finances to reward you for being active — no matter where or how you work out. Science shows incentivizing good health behaviors improves health outcomes, which is good for individuals and good for the world. We built Paceline to get people moving — a movement that I believe has the power to change the nature of preventive health in society.
Paceline’s free rewards app allows users that achieve 150-minutes of elevated heart rate (as recommended by the AHA and as tracked by wearables like FitBit, Garmin, and Apple Watch) the ability to earn gift cards and discounts to top wellness brands such as Daily Harvest, Hyperice, and Alala.
The Paceline Card supercharges what people can earn when they hit their weekly 150 minutes of exercise. When Card members hit their ‘streak,’ in addition to the redeemable benefits unlocked through the Paceline app, they can earn up to 5% unlimited cash back on purchases from all qualifying Health & Wellness merchants (including pharmacies, grocery stores, spa, gyms) and up to 3% unlimited cash back on all other qualifying purchases, as well as statement credit reimbursements for Apple Watch (up to $429 value), should they choose to purchase one with their card.
So, it’s a no-brainer if you work out regularly, and it acts as an accountability coach if you need a little push to keep your exercise routine.
How do you think this might change the world?
Today, more than ever, healthcare models are challenged across the world. While it’s critically important to ensure that society has access to quality healthcare, there is also an urgent need to change society’s approach to preventive health.
In the United States, of the $4 trillion we spend annually on healthcare, only an estimated 3% of spending is on prevention (Yong et al., 2010)! And yet, more than 80% of disease burden and 70% of death worldwide is driven by preventable lifestyle behaviors.
While it costs hundreds of billions of dollars to care for those in poor health, current healthcare systems aren’t incentivized to proactively keep them well; whereas, keeping people healthy and living longer actually benefits life insurance companies’ bottom line. Plus, science tells us people who are physically active for about 150 minutes per week have an estimated 33% lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who are not active. That’s good for you and good for the world.
We believe that life insurance companies can and should be the payers of preventive health in society. So, we set out to create an ecosystem that can achieve it, building proprietary fintech that combines the data from fitness wearables with financial services — all, for the first time, in a mobile-first, native embedded finance platform that will fundamentally enable people to be paid to live longer, healthier, and better lives.
Paceline has the unique ability to incentivize better health outcomes by aligning two of the most important elements of people’s lives: physical and financial health. Paceline’s consumer fitness app is inherently engaging and meaningfully enhanced by the financial products they introduce to consumers, including their credit card — which will become the vehicle through which billions of life insurance dollars will move from companies’ profit margins into consumers’ pockets.
What most excites you about the banking or payments industry as it is today? Can you explain what you mean?
The banking industry is experiencing a new wave of transformation, due to changing consumer behaviors and the integration of technology into their daily lives. The ways people engage with their banks and, more broadly, the payment industry is evolving from a necessary, transactional experience to an integrated extension of lifestyle and way to connect with community. PayPal paved the way for person-to-person products like Venmo and Zelle, and so on.
In short, banking is now an opportunity to build community. The pandemic forced many of these innovations into a virtual community setting, and we’re seeing the power of these virtual communities in the connected fitness/finance space too.
What we haven’t seen — and what sets Paceline apart — is that we internationally designed the Paceline experience to be easy and engaging as a lifestyle app that fosters community and just happens to have a financial services product embedded in it. This, in and of itself, is miles beyond what legacy financial services companies are able to offer because their technology and infrastructure is decades old.
I’m very interested in the importance of user experience. How much of your interactions have moved to digital such as chatbots, encrypted messaging apps, phone, or video calls? How has this shift impacted the user and customer experience? What challenges do these apps present when used as a customer engagement tool?
We’re a digital first platform. As I mentioned, we’ve been very intentional in designing the Paceline experience. The Paceline Card is connected to the app, where you can easily see a daily settlement; so, you’re seeing a cash back amount that reflects your purchases from that day, and when you hit your streak that week, you see all of those cash back amounts, double. You see the real-time value of the physical activity work you’re putting in. There’s no surprise at the end of the month; and that’s done deliberately to empower people to make better health and wellness decisions every day and better financial decisions every day.
How would you articulate how the concept of money has changed in recent times? Is it really a change? How is it still the same? Can you explain what you mean?
In recent years, and certainly accelerated by COVID-19, the concept of money has truly shifted from a tangible asset (dollars and cents) to a digital asset (NFTs, cryptocurrencies, digital wallets, peer-to-peer lending and money-sending platforms, etc.). With this shift, we’ve all adapted new habits that immerse us in a digital world. I rarely carry cash these days — does anyone? Yet the fundamentals of personal finance — how to spend money; save it; how we build financial habits that move us toward our financial goals — these concepts remain the same.
And now more than ever, people are prioritizing their financial health in a similar way that had previously been reserved for your physical wellness. At Paceline, we know that whether you’re talking about physical health or financial wellness (the two are inextricably linked, by the way), the science shows that we improve health outcomes by improving health behaviors. Paceline’s goal is exactly that — to connect your physical and financial health with an app and credit card powered by movement, ultimately enabling people to get paid to live healthier, better, and longer lives.
Based on your vantage point as an insider in the industry, what innovations should we expect to see in banking in the short and medium term?
I think we’re at the starting line as we think about the impact digital health will have shaking up staid healthcare models and challenging the financial / business models that support them.
I hope we will see more cross-industry innovation and collaboration to better connect preventive health and financial services, which would have immediate and direct benefit in our individual lives and across our communities. Our bodies and minds are connected; so are our fitness and our finances when it comes to our wellbeing.
In your particular experience, how has the pandemic changed Paceline?
In the last two years, financial health has emerged as an important part of how people define their overall well-being. Healthcare, physical and mental wellness have never been more front and center in conversations among consumers, governments, NGOs, etc.
In short, the pandemic has made Paceline’s mission more urgent and our community engagement even stronger.
Through the power of the app experience, we’ve seen people realize that even that 10-minute walk can add up, whereas pre-pandemic, there was more of an emphasis on 45 min/hour + exercise classes — for example. Paceline also gave people an easy way to feel motivated to continue working on their fitness goals. With nearly 1 million users, Paceline has allowed people to redefine or realign what working out means for them, and what value that it holds.
Fantastic. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career In The Modern Finance & Fintech Industries?
While modern finance and fintech requires a significant degree of expertise to build meaningful products and services, at the end of the day, it’s those first business principles you learn that continue to be the most important: understanding how value can be created to serve consumers and businesses in better, smarter, and more seamless ways.
Today that requires digital and technology savvy, a modern approach to business models (think — building large freemium to premium products and platforms), and the ability to scale with strong unit economics to drive long term, high margin customer value.
I think for anyone looking to build a successful career or business, put simply — find the nexus between strong technical expertise and deep industry experience, and apply it to innovative consumer business models to reinvent or reinvigorate the most traditional or staid of industries!
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
There are quite a few life lessons I’ve learned along the way that I try to emulate every day. Perhaps the most important one in the context of this conversation is a quote from my maternal grandfather who was the Mayor of Sacramento, CA back in the 60s and 70s when Ronald Reagan was Governor of the state. He told me — everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time. That no matter who you are, we’re all just human with more in common among us than there are differences. I think about this often as we build Paceline, because it’s critical we remember who we are, where we came from and where we are going, and treat everyone equally along the way.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Hopefully with Paceline, we’re inspiring a movement to get people moving, and to see their physical health as a valuable asset that they should be rewarded for pursuing.
We know that our physical and financial health are inextricably linked. However, the systems that support them are not. The number one stressor for Americans is their finances. (There are so many sources for this, most recently this survey by Thriving Wallet, a project backed by Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global and Discover). And stress has a huge impact on your physical and mental health. Alternatively, exercise can reduce stress and improve overall health.
And yet, there are more than 300 million people in the United States who need motivation to be more active. According to the CDC and the National Institute of Health, 75% of Americans are not physically active enough. Couple that with the overwhelming percentage of illness and disease driven by preventable lifestyle behaviors, and you can see the importance of movement to build a healthier society.
Paceline has the unique ability to incentivize the pursuit of better health and finances together by connecting your physical health to your everyday purchases and financial well-being.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Thank you so much for the time you spent doing this interview. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success.
