10 Takeaways from A FinTech Disruption Panel
Digit’s Head of Product Operations attended Association for Financial Technology (AFT) spring summit and spoke at the FinTech disruption panel. Here are her top takeaways from the panel.
✅ Even though FinTechs are primarily tech based there is a large focus to build human connection with the users by building personality and moments of delight in the app itself. Customer service is trained to be user centric and user interactions are designed make users feel special.
✅ Product principles like empathy and simplicity are key to building delightful customer experiences.
✅ Getting users’ trust is paramount especially in times when everyone is vying for similar users and their paycheck. Having product features that builds trust and provides users control over their finances is key
✅ Onboarding users is more nuanced that just opening an account, onboarding ends when the users fully understands the product and its value. Engaging with users during their “onboarding” period ensures higher retention
✅ Growth and Fraud are two sides of the same coin for a lot of FinTechs. If you dial up growth, fraud will rise and that’s the reality of world we live in because of the sophisticated fraudsters and the digital tools at their disposal. To ensure healthy growth with low fraud rates the focus should be on passive data collection (device, phone number, email, etc) and tiered risk levels based on this data. This will allow the FinTechs to focus on seamless customer experience for good users and introduce friction for the fraudulent users.
✅ KYC/CIP process can no longer be relied upon to truly know your customers because of all the big data breaches that has flooded the dark web with stolen customer identities.
✅ FinTechs are a wrapper over legacy financial institutions and partners. Right now a FinTech could easily be integrating with 12–15 partners if they want to bring savings, investing and banking product to market. Having multiple partners breaks customer experience, creates too many points of failure and causes customer confusion
✅ A lot goes into the build vs. buy decision with Financial partners. However, the most important question is whether the partner’s product is core to a FinTech’s business or not. Usually anything that is core to the FinTech’s business model e.g. algorithms, ledger, user interface, is not outsourced to maintain product differentiation irrespective of how good the partner product is.
✅ Financial partners to FinTech could be a step ahead if they constantly seek feedback on their roadmap from FinTechs. FinTechs are more than happy to do A/B testing of new features or play around with new UIs
✅ FinTechs are as strong as the financial partners that powers them. Financial partners should design their products by keeping the end customers in mind and proactively add features that are innovative
