 Hey everyone, my name is Teneja Eel and I'm super excited to be chatting with you all today in this talk I'm going to be sharing with you all the reasons why I think there is so much potential in creating user impact via fintech products and Why there's so much energy and momentum into space in the last couple of years in general We will start out with a brief introduction to my story and my kind of windy path towards working in fintech Then we'll put on the lens of a product manager who's setting out to create user impact via fintech and go through the strategic and product Challenges that we're going to face along the way Through this hypothetical situation we'll dive into how to define impact how to navigate complexity and how to evolve your product So this talk is not about me, but let me give you some context as to how I ended up here I started off my career at LinkedIn where I worked on job seeking team building the end-to-end Experience of someone looking for a job on the LinkedIn platform While I was there I helped start a brand new team that was focused specifically on the blue collar or first line Workforce such as retail employees and food service workers and to scale the LinkedIn platform to their job seeking needs From there I moved to China to bridge my interest in product management and public policy Where I focused on a wide variety of things through the shortsman scholars program Things like isn't disinformation cyber security data privacy things like that And this is kind of where my interest in fintech really sparked because while living in China You know one of the most noticeable day-to-day trends was how impactful fintech was for the everyday person From food vendors who could accept payments seamlessly to millions of Chinese people that could use Digital apps for savings and investing. I joined Google after that where I was a PM working on Google pay building spending and savings tools to improve people's financial well-being and Currently, I'm at strike where I'm a PM working on improving access to lending and financing for small businesses through striped capital Through all these experiences a central mission for me has been building economic opportunity through technology products And this mission strongly overlaps with fintech at its best and when designed with intention Fintech can be a way to scale financial health and well-being for anyone So now let's get into the real stuff, which is how exactly to accomplish that today Let's pretend that we're all product managers who are looking to build a fintech product It helps enhance the financial well-being of users today is day one and we're trying to decide what we should be building And how to create the most user impact So if you're new to the space, you'll probably start somewhere like here by looking at an industry chart of the fintech ecosystem Things like crypto insurance remittances and robo advisors are neatly sorted into their own categories in terms of what we could be building Because of frameworks like this We often see impact in fintech framed in terms of what we are trying to build like an alternative financial system for example And as we get started, it's tempting to do two things one is to think about fintech products in these specific silos and two is just to kind of pick one of these segments and jump right in But if you're someone who's looking to deliver an impactful fintech product that improves the financial lives of users Instead of approaching this problem with this chart I actually suggest flipping the script and starting with the first principles of what users want when it comes to their money If we really break it down, there are five things that people want to do with their money in the interest of improving their financial situation The first is people want to move money easily. It's crazy that in 2022 is still so hard to move money Even with the growth of fintech tons of payments are still happening via ACH Paper checks international cross-border transactions that are very complicated and other slow and inefficient transaction methods The second thing people want to do with their money is they want to save money consistently 40% of Americans in a survey stated that they would struggle to come up with $400 for an emergency expense and we've seen over the last few years of the pandemic how kind of acute this need has been The third is people want to borrow money conveniently across both the personal and business basis Financing can be incredibly difficult to come by for example in the SMB space We see that access to capital is one of the primary bottlenecks to grow for small businesses in the US The fourth thing is spending money frugally a survey by Intuit in 2020 found that almost two-thirds of Americans Don't know how much money they actually spent the last month It can be super difficult to track expenses and know where to cut costs for your budget and Finally people want to grow money wisely 90% of stocks today in the US are owned by just 10% of Americans which leaves a lot of the rest of Americans wondering What are the best ways to invest and grow my money? So if we kind of zoom out these are you know the five things that people want to do with their money And what they want from their financial lives for today's exercise Let's just pick one of them save money consistently and see kind of how the space looks So for the vast majority of Americans today, they're checking in savings accounts are the primary tool they use to save money consistently But for this user needs, what are the fintech solutions that are merging today? First off we have new banks like chime and current who are trying to build the new new banking experiences for users with a focus on financial health Savings and no fee propositions, but it's not just products in the banking space. They're tackling this user need We also have Investing apps like Robin Hood and Wealthfront that are building cash management features and cash accounts complete with debit cards to help you store and save We also have crypto companies like Coinbase and Gemini that will accept your direct deposit and help you earn a high APY with DeFi Also in the fray are payments apps like Venmo and Cash App They're starting to offer features like check cashing and early tax refunds And we even have platforms like Shopify that are not fintech companies at their core Who have products like Shopify balance that helps merchants keep and save money on their platform? What's really interesting here is that all five of these companies showed up in different boxes in the industry chart that we just took a look at But when we start with the user problem the silos from that chart break down a little bit And we start to see that the industry and its players can be grouped by what they are trying to help users do Rather than which fin tech and each they belong to Although each of these players are building different products from each other in different ways and savings is of varying levels of Importance to each of them depending on their product strategy. They each have features that are addressing this kind of same user problem This always reminds me of that famous read Hastings comment that Netflix's greatest competitor isn't actually just a bunch of other streaming services It's sleep because the true focus of your product shouldn't be on what you're building But rather what your users are trying to do which in Netflix's case is deciding how to spend their free time So for this reason, I reckon I'm starting with some of these core user needs Rather than focusing on where in the fintech industry you are when you're kind of thinking about how to be users first So let's say now that you know decided we want to work in this field of saving help and user save money consistently And we're starting to think about our product and as we're learning and building in the space We're encountering a lot of complexity that exists in our financial system Let's talk about the different kinds of complexity might be encountering The first kind is technical complexity the fact that we have to both work with the existing financial system in financial rails and Also invent new approaches and abstractions at the same time We have partner complexity the fact is that no one builds fintech products in isolation And so you have a large host of partners to work with and connect with when it comes to different elements of financial infrastructure We have marketing complexity the fact that the financial system and money movement is super complicated and fragmented and just Explaining these products to an end user. It can be really difficult We have competitive complexity the fact that the industry itself is changing literally every day and your competitors are shipping features of Lightning fast speeds We have trapdoor complexity the fact that sometimes decisions are made an infrastructure level that are really deep and difficult to unwind down the road And we have regulatory complexity the need to understand the myriad of laws licenses and legal requirements in the space What I think is really unique about fintech is that these complexities arise not just when you're creating your strategy or doing annual planning But for nearly every feature of your product for our imaginary savings app Each of these complexities emerge when we're building onboarding savings accounts interest rates account closure KYC third-party integrations P2P payments and so much more as an illustrative example Let's suppose we're trying to build mobile check deposit functionality for our savings app So we cannot allow users to deposit their paychecks We'll encounter each of these types of complexity in this process on the regulatory side reg cc And funds availability notices are requirements that require us to disclose to users and help set their expectations when their money will be available We'll have technical complexity. What technology do we use to capture check information and fight fraud? We have partner complexity. Who should we be working with as a check processing partner? We have marketing complexity How do we explain to a user when their money is going to be available? There's competitive complexity with different players launching their own check caching functionality and there's trapdoor complexity Once we start offering the ability for this It'll be super hard to unwind down the road if we're ever trying to simplify our app They're moving in a different direction as users begin to rely on this core. It's part of the experience It can be overwhelming to navigate this much complexity and a feature that you thought was a molehill can quickly turn into a mountain Here are a few tips when navigating feature level complexity, which we'll kind of go through with our mobile check deposit feature First is make sure to differentiate in your product strategy Table stakes features versus innovative features and ask yourself whether the complexity you're digging through is going to make you stand out As a product or just kind of meet a table stakes requirement The more innovative your product the higher your bar should be for what kind of complexity you're willing to tolerate and For table stakes features like maybe check deposit which PayPal only launched last year and got you know Buy without for many many years any trim scope and do only what's necessary to check the box Second understand why the complexity exists so you can connect threads across features And this will help you decide what your best approach should be and what other features your solutions can help scale for For example, you know regulations around funds availability were passed as early as the 80s to help give users clarity on When they could expect money that was kind of in limbo So this same concerns and principles could come up for other forms of money movement And so when we're thinking through how we can you know meet regulatory requirements for check deposit We can also make sure to think through this for other features and use cases where it comes up and Finally and most importantly don't let complexity ever reach your users Keep in mind the simplicity and intuitiveness that they want from their money the best and tech solutions not only navigate that web of Complexity they make it invisible for the end user So now fast forward, you know You built your first version of your savings app and things are going really well You're getting some users you're starting to see growth in deposits and you're wondering what's next You've got users attached to a hero use case, but how do you grow from there? This is a super common problem and the pattern is always always the same a fintech app starts with a hero user journey It acquires users it builds momentum and then it realizes that it needs something more these to move on to new use cases And this realization comes for one of three reasons and I'll explain what those reasons are through some real-life examples Let's take three popular apps Robin Hood chime and Venmo Each of which have had breakout success in different fintech niches investing banking and payments The first reason is the need to make your current features work better This is what Robin had probably experienced many years ago when they realized that a huge barrier for getting people to Invest and creating a faster investing experience was the need to first move money into your Robin Hood account from your bank account And they thought about how investing would be easier if people just stored their money in the app The second reason to think about expansion is to keep your users interested and retained Chime had seen a lot of growth and demand for their bank account and likely realized that While this is great a bank account isn't the best daily use case It's something that users check once in a while when their paycheck comes in or when they want to look through their transactions But they could be doing better in terms of keeping users engaged and retained for a longer period of time my guess is they started looking out for something that would get users to open chime multiple times a day and That's why they started thinking about use cases around payments to pay their friends and family for ongoing expenses The third reason to kind of expand into new use cases as a fintech app is to keep up with the competition Then most started of course with p2p payments But I think it's fair to say that the entrance of cash app has had an impact on their product strategy and roadmap Given the roaring success that cash app has had with crypto investing then Mo has made a sharp and noticeable pivot to incorporate Crypto investing in their strategy even making it one of the home tabs in their latest design and That's how we get to kind of where we are today where so many fintech apps have built adjacent products to their core use cases All of this is to say you're basically in good company Lots of fintechs have experienced the need to grow their product suite But there's a really kind of clear way to think about it and how to approach it So here's a couple things to keep in mind as you evolve your fintech product The first thing is build off the core use cases that users already trust you for For example, we see cash up do this with their recent foray into taxes Americans across the country used cash app to get their stimulus checks a few days early Using their direct deposit feature during the pandemic and cash up is leaning into that user trust and value in their tax product By emphasizing that you can get your refund faster, too That's a great strategy for helping bridge users from your core use case into new things you want them to try The second is use feature functionality to deepen your core product What this means in a nutshell is when users expand into your new feature their existing features get better, too Chime demonstrated this in their credit builder product which offers users a secured backed credit card to help them build their credit score This meant that users could still use the chime account They loved but get an added bonus of a boosted credit score via the same product interactions Using heuristics like this can help us decide what's the next area? We should be expanding into for our savings app and what's the right direction to lean into for our product So just to kind of sum up right as we're going through this journey Here's a few things that we've discussed as we're building the savings app The first thing is remember start with the user problems not necessarily the industry niche It'll help you stay grounded on what core functionality you want your product to have and how you can expand The second is pick your battles when it comes to complexity and make sure that you abstract it away from your users And the final thing is you know make sure to build off of core use cases when you're evolving your product Start with the things that people already trust you for and ask yourself How new features and new experiences can feed back into your core user journeys? A big theme throughout this talk that I hope sticks with you is that users really really really care about their experiences with fintech products Because it has to do with our core relationship with money So while this means there is a high quality bar for fintech products It also means that there is a ton of potential for impact if you do this right Thanks so much for your time Feel free to reach out to me on twitter or on linkedin if you have any questions and thanks again