Checks, Balances and the Myth of “Free”
By Jennifer Tescher, Financial Health Network Last week’s headlines gave the impression that America is suffering from a lack of basic financial access, particularly for lower-income consumers. The fact is, consumers have more access to high-quality, low- or no-cost transaction accounts than they have had in at least a decade, thanks to dramatic changes in…
Sriracha and Superglue: Sometimes A Little Can Go a Long Way
By Tanya Ladha and Rachel Schneider, Financial Health Network Maybe you’ve been there — you break a dish, clean down the middle. You find the superglue, carefully squeeze a small stream of the potent liquid on either side of the break, and patiently hold for the allotted 90 seconds. When you move to place the mended dish…
For Consumer Protection and Health, Look to the States
By Jeanne Hogarth, Financial Health Network The recent turmoil in leadership at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the initial actions of the acting director point to at least one conclusion: For consumers to continue to have access to high quality, innovative products that help them improve their financial health, focus needs to shift…
Financial Solutions Lab’s 2017 Diversity Report
As an active participant in the fintech ecosystem, the Financial Solutions Lab shares in the responsibility to create a more inclusive industry, especially for female founders and people of color. Last year, we published our early thinking on the Financial Solutions Lab’s role to support and encourage diversity within the early-stage fintech space, and candidly […]
The Financially Underserved Market: What Drives A $173 Billion Opportunity?
Building financial health can be a challenge for financially underserved consumers. What products address their needs in this evolving marketplace? To learn more about the underserved market opportunity, download Financial Health Network’s 2017 Financially Underserved Market Size Study. How did financially underserved consumers borrow, spend, save, and plan in 2016? From the increased prevalence of…
Fintech Founder Q&A: Nova
Imagine leaving the nation of your birth–where you had great credit, a car, a home, a bank account–and moving to the United States for the first time. While you might think that having great credit in your home country would ease the financial path ahead, today that’s simply not the case. Your credit history doesn’t […]
Winning the Long Game: Reimagining Credit to Build Consumer Financial Health
Financially underserved consumers spend $173 billion annually to manage their day-to-day financial lives — including $97 billion on short-term credit products. How can lending solutions build brand loyalty that grows with borrowers’ financial health? To learn more about credit and the underserved market opportunity, download Financial Health Network’s 2017 Financially Underserved Market Size Study. This fall, the…
Startups: Win Your Way to Money20/20
Money20/20 is the world’s largest marketplace for ideas, connections and deals in Payments and Financial Services. It’s where leaders — representing every sector of the industry — come to seize new business opportunities, strengthen partnerships and discover the latest disruptions. With 11,000+ attendees — including more than 1,700 CEOs and Presidents from a whopping 4,500 companies and 85 countries — Money20/20 brings together…
Fintech Founder Q&A: Tomorrow
With nearly three quarters of Americans living without life insurance, there’s no question estate planning is a major issue that often goes unaddressed by far too many in this country. That’s why Dave Hanley, co-founder of the app Tomorrow, wanted to make estate planning more accessible to the average American, not just the wealthy. The […]
Fintech Founder Q&A: Token Transit
A former software engineer at Google, Morgan Conbere had the chops to solve everyday problems using software development. He also knew there was one space that was ripe for improvement: public transit. In 2017, Conbere and a group of co-founders–Zachary Browne, Samuel Daly, and Ekaterina Kuznetsova–came together to create Token Transit, a platform that allows […]
New Report on Consumer Data Sharing out From Financial Health Network
In our last blog about consumer data access, we discussed the challenges that startups face when it comes to accessing their users’ financial data in order to build innovative tools. Today, we’re back to share that the Financial Health Network has just published a new report on this topic: Liability, Transparency and Consumer Control in […]
Financial Solutions Lab Snapshot 2017: This Just In
Today, the Financial Health Network released its 2017 Snapshot paper. In this report, authored by members of the Financial Solutions Lab, we discuss the latest trends in fintech and provide an overview of the market segment as informed by our analysis of over 360 applications from 2017, the more than 1,000 applications in our first […]