I've spent my career in fintech, but the journey started before I had even graduated college in 2010 (I am old).
To snapshot the moment: my phone was a Motorola Slider, I had never owned a credit card, TiK ToK was the #1 song of the year (not a social app), an oil rig spilled 170 million gallons of crude into the Gulf, and the Saints notched their first Super Bowl win against the Colts.
'Fintech' wasn't a word.
Google searches for 'fintech' over time.
Two things happened in 2010: I wrote an article in the Stanford Review on The Future of the Wallet and I became a student marketing ambassador for a company called Bling Nation.
Bling Nation was a company co-founded by Wences Casares and Micky Malka (who later founded Ribbit Capital) that raised $8 million in 2009 to turn phones into wallets via a stick-on RFID chip called a BlingTag or a 'Blinger.' Our job as campus reps was to drive adoption of the stickers, which were – thanks to some proactive negotiation by the company – already accepted as a form of payment at campus favorites the CoHo, Treehouse, Ray’s, Fraiche, and Jimmy V’s.
The value proposition couldn't be simpler:
Connect your credit card to the BlingTag via a simple mobile UI, powered by PayPal.
Stick the RFID tag on your phone.
Start paying for everything by phone.
To sweeten the deal, Bling Nation offered new-joiners $20 each of free credit to sign up. This was well before the era of Lyft, Uber, Doordash, and GrubHub sign-up incentives. And so, armed with our tags, we campus reps descended on Stanford (and GSB beer pong night) to get people signed up for Bling, confident that $20 in free money combined with the simple value proposition of leaving your wallet at home and paying with your phone would be a no-brainer.
One day soon, we believed, these RFID tags would replace credit cards entirely.
They did not.
I'll be the first to admit that I am not a great salesperson, but I was suprised that people did not want to put the stickers on their new iPhones – even turning down free money. My experience as an unsuccessful campus rep taught me a valuable fintech product lesson that has stuck with me to this day: Don't force people to perform unnatural acts.
One of the pieces of writing that shaped my early product thinking was Steve Krug's 2005 book Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. The book has many great insights for designing web UIs, but one that maps to my Bling experience is "“If something requires a large investment of time — or looks like it will — it’s less likely to be used."
In retrospect, based on the success of QR codes in Southeast Asia, the success of Apple Pay in the US (launched 4 years later), and the success of Google Wallet in Europe: Bling Nation had the right idea – mobile phones were on their way to replacing wallets – but the behavior felt unnatural to new users.
The onboarding motion forced people to do something they were unfamiliar with: put their sensitive card info onto an easy-to-misplace sticker (possibly FPANs! I'm not sure whether DPANs were enabled by PayPal at the time) and put a chunky sticker onto their sleek iPhones. It felt like an unnatural act. People weren't used to paying with their phones and the convenience of the BlingTag required too much thinking about whether to tie your card to a sticker and a sticker to your phone.
This is an insight that's broadly applicable across fintech, and it's one that I see companies fail to apply by not asking themselves simple questions like:
Are you making your customers pay for a service that they've come to expect for free?
Is your product embedded in the place that your customers normally manage their finances (or payments, or KYC, or lending...) or does it require them to go somewhere else, somewhere new?
Does your product speak the language that people speak to themselves when they think about money? (Are you showing them a credit card APR % or an estimate of how much the interest will cost them in dollar terms?)
How much friction are you introducing between where the customer is and where you want them to be?
And how badly do they want to be where you want them to – badly enough to power through clunky KYC verification? Badly enough to retry their purchase after confirming it's not fraudulent?
Net-net: Whether you're selling an enterprise B2B financial product or a free consumer fintech app, you need to understand what your customers will consider 'natural acts' (eg: managing all their subscriptions in one simple dashboard) vs. 'unnatural acts' (eg: inputting their quarterly financials into an FP&A forecasting dashboard, only to copy-paste the forecasts back into Excel...)
It doesn't matter whether your customers are lazy, under-resourced, over bandwidth, or thinking about things 'the wrong way'; the best fintech products in the world can suffer if they're not immediately intuitive to their users, and if they don't integrate into the simple workflows and routines that their users are already in.
Since my early forays into fintech, I've spent time in product meetings at Funding Circle, Petal, and Google Pay where we read through UXR and customer service conversations to understand how people were interacting with our products. We focused less on what they liked and more on where they were hung-up. The transcripts always revealed interesting insights about how people approached products with completely different perspectives about how something should work, and it colors my thinking as an investor today when I play around with early prototypes.
Early-stage founders are stretched in many, many different directions, but I think some of the the time best-spent is their time sitting down with customers and watching them use the product. It's only when you see your customers in action that you understand what, to them, is a natural act and an 'unnatural' one. And the more 'unnatural acts' you can eliminate, the more easily you can scale your product, and the more affinity you build with your users.
