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 […]

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…

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 […]

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…

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…

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 […]

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 […]

Banks want to know what around the corner is trying to put them out of business, so it’s no surprise that a spate of fintech-focused accelerator programs has sprung into existence in recent years. For example, Deutsche Bank just opened its fourth innovation lab in New York this year, after opening outposts in Silicon Valley, […]

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 […]

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 […]

By The Financial Panther I like to think that I’m pretty financially healthy. At 30 years old, I’m in a fairly unique position. I’m currently debt free after paying off nearly six figures worth of student loans in just a few years. I’ve got a sizable emergency fund that should cover me in the event…

By Donna Freedman (FinCon and the Center for Financial Services Innovation are sponsoring a writing contest: “In 500 words, explain what financial health means to you.” Here are my thoughts.) My journey to financial health was entirely roundabout, and I didn’t get there until middle age. Financial survival, not financial health, was the focus of…