Creating User Impact Through Fintech by Stripe Product Leader, Tanay Jaeel

Our perspective for today

Product person looking to build a fintech product that enhances users`financial wellbeing.

If you are a beginner, you will start with something as simple as looking at an industry chart of the fintech ecosystem.

Things like insurance cryptography, money transfers, and advisory bots are neatly categorized. Because of these frameworks, we often see the impact of fintech in terms of what we are trying to build, such as an alternative financial system. If you want to create an effective fintech product that improves users' financial lives, start with what users want when it comes to their money.

Elements of financial well-being

1. Move money easily

2. Save money consistently

3. Borrow money conveniently

4. Spend money frugally

5. Grow money wisely

Save money consistently

There are new banks that are trying to create a new banking experience for users with a strong focus on financial health, savings and commission-free offers.
There are investment apps that create money management features to help users save and save.
There are crypto companies that will accept your direct deposit and help you earn.
There are payment apps that offer features like check cashing and early tax refunds.
There are also platforms that are not inherently fintech companies, but they have products that help merchants save and save money on their platform.

All these five companies are in different columns of the industry chart, but when we start with the user problem, the silos of this chart weaken a little.

Although each of these players build different products from each other in different ways, and savings have a different level of importance for each of them depending on their product strategy, they each have features that solve the same user problem.
So it's better to start with some of the basic user needs instead of focusing on where you are in the fintech industry.

Various kinds of difficulties you may face.

Tips for navigating complexity by feature level.

1. Tablestakes vs. Innovation

2. Understand the why behind hurdles so you can scale solutions

3. Don't let the complexity reach your users.

A fintech app starts with the journey of a user hero, it picks up pace and realizes it needs something more, it needs to move on to new use cases. This awareness occurs for one of three reasons.
1. The need to improve your current features.
2. Interest and retain your users.
3. Keep up with the competition

All this suggests that you are in good company.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind when you are developing your fintech product:

1. Expand from core use cases that users already trust you for

2. Use new feature functionality to deepen and enrich your core product.

Summary

1. Start with the user problems, not the industry niche

2. Pick your battles with complexity and abstract it away from users

3. Build off core use cases when evolving your product.

Tanay Jaeel, Stripe Product Leader