Rewiring FinHealth: 3 Takeaways From EMERGE 2024

In June, our community gathered for three days at EMERGE 2024 to celebrate 20 years of the financial health movement. Two months later, we’re still buzzing with excitement – and reflecting on the themes that will continue to shape our movement’s next chapter. 

When the Financial Health Network launched in 2004, our goal was to expand banking access to millions of Americans left behind by our current system. Today, more Americans have access to a bank account than ever, yet 70% of Americans are not Financially Healthy and deep disparities keep growing. We must do better to build a financial system that helps everyone thrive. This year’s EMERGE theme, “Reflect. Rethink. Rewire.,” called on our community to reflect on the progress we’ve made, rethink our systems and practices, and rewire our society to truly support financial health for all – especially those who have been historically marginalized. 

Many of the lively discussions, lessons, and stories shared at EMERGE dug deep into persistent barriers to financial health and what it will take to break them. Lets take a look back at the biggest EMERGE moments that will continue to define our work.

Keeping Equity Front and Center

Leaders across all sectors spoke about the racial wealth gap, financial barriers for women, and other entrenched disparities across our economy. As we move forward, rewiring systems around equity will be crucial to truly achieve financial health for all. But what does that look like in practice? 

Speakers noted that closing these gaps will take a multi-pronged approach: intentionally designing products and services to support those historically left behind, rethinking systemic systems and practices in areas like credit underwriting and venture capital, and rewiring who makes decisions to include diverse voices. Examples from our sessions included: 

Advancing Equity in Financial Services Access
In the wake of the pandemic, the Mission Asset Fund created an emergency grant program that received 117,000 applications. During a panel session on racial equity, CEO José Quiñonez shared how they centered equity in the grant selection process. 

“Normally, what people do is first come, first serve, or a lottery,” he said. “That actually deepens inequality because you basically are supporting people that have the fastest internet access or the fastest access to information.” 

Instead, the Mission Asset Fund created a framework to deepen the data they analyzed for each application. 

“We thought about our grant as an income stream that we wanted to add to the people that had less income,” he said. “We actually collected information about income streams and their financial obligations from family constraints and then said, ‘Here are the people that could do the most with the $500.’” 

Building Holistic Solutions to Systemic Inequities
Communities of color have faced systemic barriers across generations that have harmed their ability to build wealth. During a fireside chat following a screening of his Oscar-nominated ‘The  Barber of Little Rock’ documentary, Arlo Washington shared how his visionary People Trust bank is approaching financial health differently to close the racial wealth gap. 

“The onboarding ramp for unbanked individuals is a financial institution,” he said. “So if there’s no financial institution in the neighborhood, that is something that creates a barrier or a challenge for these individuals to be able to access the financial system. Our strategy was to be able to use a place-based strategy.” 

However, according to Arlo, placing a bank directly in the community it serves is only the first step. Historically marginalized people still struggle to build wealth even with banking access because they lack the tools – like credit – to open accounts or get loans. 

“It takes credit to get credit…The community members we serve, they just don’t understand because they hadn’t had an opportunity to be able to [build credit],” he said. “There’s no stores that you can do credit in the community. Furniture stores don’t report your credit. Buy here, pay here dealerships don’t report your credit.” 

Arlo founded People Trust to be an institution that’s both easier for its community to access and teaches its community the skills to thrive financially. 

“We wanted to solve for us being able to establish a relationship with the credit bureaus to be able to report credit on those small dollar loans that oftentimes are not available to low-income communities,” he said. “We also have development services that we offer – financial literacy, technical assistance for distadvantaged small businesses.”

Meeting People Where They Are

Our personal experiences profoundly shape our relationships with money – a lesson that speakers like best-selling author Stephanie Land and fintech founder Wemimo Abbey illustrated so movingly at EMERGE. 

“There were some months, especially in the time period that Maid took place, that I was working full-time but after paying all of my bills I only had $20 left,” Land said during an intimate fireside chat. “It was that narrow of a margin in how I survived.”

Helping customers and workers achieve their unique financial goals requires practicing empathy, using data to generate actionable insights, and personalizing solutions around their needs. This demands that organizations understand the people they serve and the challenges they face, an example Land sets in her explanation of the realities she once lived as a domestic worker.  

“We assign dignity to the jobs that we do instead of just being a human being, and so we confuse that with there’s lacking dignity, there’s lacking skills, there’s lacking education, and all of that is not true for a lot of people in domestic work,” Land said. “For many domestic workers, the thing that they need is benefits, job security, real viable pay, and to be treated like a normal employee.” 

For Abbey, facing stigmas early in life spurred him to take action to change the system for others. When the Nigerian-born entrepreneur and his mother struggled to secure a loan in the U.S. because they lacked a credit score, he was inspired to launch Esusu, a fintech working to help people build credit with data from on-time rent payments.   

“Where you come from, the color of your skin, and, above all, your financial identity shouldn’t determine where you end up in the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen,” he noted during his EMERGE session. 

Balancing Tech’s Risks and Rewards

While automation and machine learning have been at work in the financial services sector for decades, it’s generative AI that’s poised to change the industry for decades to come. Generative AI models offer vast potential for scaling services like financial advising, but can also exacerbate inequities or compromise customer security because of the data they require. 

“The models themselves are dependent upon the data that they’re being fed and to the extent that the data are not representative of populations that you’re trying to evaluate, you’re going to get biased, unfair outcomes,” FinReg Lab Chief Executive Officer Melissa Koide said during a panel discussion on AI. 

Business leaders also shared how they’re working to support responsible and inclusive innovation and how they’re already using these tools in their organizations. 

“We’re starting to see companies that are leveraging AI on the front end to better engage with and serve their customers,” ResilienceVC Co-Founder and General Partner Tahira Dosani said. “It’s to really find better ways for them to deliver personalized financial recommendations to their customers.” 

What does this look like in a more traditional banking setting? 

“We’re building our own architecture so that we can use more sensitive data in a controlled way, and we can protect it from security vulnerability. We can test our own data for bias,” noted Dean Kontul, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer – Intelligent Automation/Contact Center and Investment Operations at KeyBank. “We use it to expand for our clients and help people with financial wellness.”