Fintech_devcon 2021 recap

Last week, Canopy had the opportunity to attend the first ever Fintech_devcon conference in Denver. The conference featured a range of extremely knowledgeable Fintech leaders: from founders to investors, analysts, and product & engineering leaders. The topics were extensive, ranging from developer experience to the infinite expansion possibilities ahead of us in Fintech. Thanks to Moov for putting the conference together!

Here are a few of our takeaways from the conference.

What to expect in Fintech’s next 10 years

Angela Strange from Andreessen Horowitz kicked things off during the opening keynote by laying out her vision for the future of Fintech by identifying the history of banking (marble banks & mainframe), the current era (SaaS/cloud), and her thoughts on the future “fourth era” of banking, open source primitives. She believes composable systems will then be built on top of these primitives, an idea which underscores (again) the importance of creating value and amazing experiences for your customers (built on top of these primitive components).

Interesting & impactful quotes:

• “What would happen if you had the smartest people all around the world contributing to the building blocks of financial services and focused on defining them in new and imaginative ways. It’s hard to bet which of 1000s of experiments will become the next billion-dollar-plus companies. But some examples could be when there is no friction between crypto and other accounts. Or what if a banking account with saving accounts finally became incredibly intelligent.”
• “We have billions of people left out of the financial system entirely. And there’s a growing number of highly talented entrepreneurs living in these communities that know the products that need to be built. What if they could just grab open source libraries and get started?”
• “Any time developers find themselves building the same thing over and over again, if they’re smart, they’ll find a way to automate it. Better yet, they’ll find a way to open source it to the community to help make it better.”
• “Every financial company will spin out a Fintech.”
• “Developers are now the buyer AND the seller.”
• “Building a product without a plan is like driving a car without an engine.”

The Business of APIs

This panel discussion, moderated by Charley Ma (GM of Fintech at Alloy), featured Justin Overdorff from Lightspeed Venture Partners (previously at Stripe); Cara Hayward, North American Director of Strategic Partnerships for Currencycloud; Peter Lord, co-founder and CEO of Codat; and Ryan Sandler, CEO and co-Founder of Truework. Some of the most interesting observations had to do with the panelists’ experience of starting with a self-serve product and then trying to move to enterprise or vice versa. Panelists also debated pricing models — fee/usage based, SaaS contract based, or bifurcated pricing based on customer segment (enterprise vs. start-up).

Some observations from the panel:

Peter Lord said Codat’s go-to-market strategy was first focused on the enterprise. His advice: “The most important thing is that our engineers understand your customers and the problem you are trying to solve.”

Justin Overdorff said Stripe’s focus on engineers meant there were no PMs for the first few years. “If you’re building for engineers, you need engineers to build it…. We figured out an efficient way to get developers to build on our product very easily. For the first five to six years, we didn’t do any marketing, just writing on Hacker News … When we started to move from self-serve to enterprise, we misunderstood things that seemed trivial to us but that the enterprise cared about. Stripe didn’t get this right away.”

Ryan Sandler: “I would say one thing some people miss is they price too low to start. If your product is not a commodity, start as high as you possibly can, and you will see pressure on that price. That allows you to capture more upside earlier and allows you to fund different parts of the business.”

Cara Hayward: “We were also very revenue-focused (in terms of the metrics they tracked) … but it was also important to look at what went into the revenue, what were the number of units it took to get to that revenue… on the account side, we are also looking at NPS, and churn.”

Charley Ma: Plaid was focused on usage. “If we expand the number of nodes that we connect into, that was the primary driver of revenue and future growth for us.”

Justin Overdorff: “One thing I would say for anyone who is building infrastructure is that your uptime is frankly the most important metric that you are going to have. And whatever scale you think you need to build to is 100x what you think it needs to be. You are going to grow faster than you think.”

Translating Card Auths for Emerging User Expectations

Maia Bittner of Chime closed out the day with a keynote that focused on how card swiping UI/UX can be improved. She shared some iPhone notifications with less than satisfactory texts. Her talk resonated with the crowd to the point that audience members began sharing examples with her as they were headed to the airport.