Data Access is the First Step to Really Cool Fintech Products — LendIt USA 2020
As a former marketer at a credit card company, I find data rich and insightful (and I will admit, a bit creepy). For a project my team was tasked with creating an acquisition journey map, marrying traffic and conversion for our site with application, approval and spend data. Since our company owned this data, my team foolishly thought it would be easy to stitch it together. Needless to say, it took months for this map to become available and when it did, we were praised for doing the unthinkable.
You can imagine how much more difficult this task becomes when you consider data that is owned by multiple teams within a company, different companies, and dare I say it — government agencies. It’s this challenge that fintechs today are tackling in the name of financial inclusion. This past month I had the pleasure of attending the “Financial Health Starts with Financial Data Access” session in the LendIt Fintech USA 2020 conference. There Avi Karnani (CEO, This is Alice), Jason Brown (CEO, Tally), Deepinder Gulati (Head of Product and Data, Qapital) and Jeff Kaiser (COO, Propel) gave us a taste of the hurdles that their companies overcame to improve the financial health of their users.
Key Takeaways:
- Quality and completeness of data is important: Tally is an automated debt manager, and Qapital uses behavioral science to help you reach a savings goal. Both have benefited from the transparency open banking, the use of open APIs that enable third-party developers to build applications and services around the financial institution, provides. However, what cannot be provided via these APIs cannot be accessed, and cannot be entered into their product’s models.
- Accessing your financial data should be easier: Propel builds software for low-income who are often overlooked by traditional tech innovation. Their FreshEBT app provides users with access to their EBT balances. Prior to their application, EBT users would call a 1–800 number to check their balance or encounter a low balance at checkout during a grocery store run. The application has improved the user experience of this task, and they use custom integrations with EBT government apps to gather this data.
- $avings requires more than linking to your credit card: Alice uses software not forms to automate employee pre-tax spending. Rather than using transaction data to help you budget, they identify potentially eligible expenses and update payrolls. Marrying data from user spending and pre-tax or tax refunds is not easy, but they got it done.
Learning about the data access issues that still exist in these companies has made me more enthusiastic about the products and services (perhaps outside of fintech) that can alleviate these pain points. The LendIt Fintech conference brought together a great crowd of speakers, and this topic was so provocative and had a wonderful call to action that everyone working in tech should pay more attention to.
