Bringing the human touch to fintech

Cultivating a fintech marketplace that contributes to worker prosperity

Following over a decade of innovation in the financial services market, which saw the rise of fintech and digital-first approaches to customer acquisition and servicing, the market trend today is a decided (re)focus on the importance of human interaction between businesses and their customers. For example, to create human-like digital experiences, we’ve seen the rise of personalization driven by AI — such as chatbots and robo-advisors.

But at critical touchpoints in the digital customer experience, people need to talk to a real human to drive outcomes like product usage, engagement, and financial behavior change. These outcomes require trust between provider and customer, which a human agent can uniquely cement.

At Neighborhood Trust, we believe that an essential component of an impactful financial product is a trusted human expert, and we see our workplace financial coaching service TrustPlus as the partner fintechs and financial services need to provide the human touch their services.

We built TrustPlus on three core principles:

1. Workers need a trustworthy human, a coach, to help them navigate the complexity.
2. Workers need the right tools to act on their coach’s advice.
3. Everyday workplace processes like payroll and benefits can turbocharge impact and support financial behavior change.

We help workers across the country improve their financial health. We do so by providing workers with trusted human guidance on their everyday financial challenges — like paying off student loans or saving to buy a house — and connecting them to vetted tools and products so they can turn the guidance and advice into actionable steps to mastering their money.

We’ve helped over 50,000 workers improve increase their savings, improve their credit score, reduce their debt — and we want to help more.

That’s why we’re partnering with select fintechs to provide a much-needed human complement to their digital financial service, offering our human financial coaching as a feature of their products.

We work with mission-aligned fintechs that are:

• Passionate about solving for financial insecurity among workers,
• Recognize the need for a human touch in financial technology solutions, and
• Are eager to tackle a good design challenge and learn together.

We recognize that we don’t know everything so we’re testing whether:

• A product’s data insights can direct users to coaching. How can the product use its data to recommend users to our coaching, at the moment they experience a life change that may require coaching?
• Our coaching can be a catalyst for product take-up and usage. Are we the starting point, and a resource along the way, for engaging with products as part of a personalized financial plan?

To learn more, contact us at fintechs@mytrustplus.org.