At the Intersection of Technology and Finance

I interviewed Brett King, Amazon best-selling author, award-winning speaker, and host of a globally recognized radio show, to discuss the intersection of finance and technology. The feature was distributed within the San Francisco Chronicle and further promoted across King's social media channels.

In order to compete in the overcrowded marketplace of traditional banking, many companies have rolled up their sleeves and used technology to help level the playing field. In a few short years, financial technology, or fintech, startups like Chime, Klarna, and Stripe have already changed how we think about money.

“Every fintech startup has as part of its central goal reducing friction and improving the customer experience,” explains Brett King, best-selling author and host of the “Breaking Banks” radio show on VoiceAmerica. “The nature of the way the incumbent system works — the inertia they build around processes, acquiring a customer, approving a customer and the interface around that — is very difficult to change.”

King, who founded the mobile banking platform Moven, says feedback shows customers appreciate transactions being made faster and easier, such as opening an account in just 90 seconds.

“That's why there's a gap, and why banks increasingly find themselves incorporating fintech user experiences and technologies into their stack, because they realize they aren't going to be able to change fast enough. By absorbing a fintech capability in this respect, they end up getting it cheaper and faster than they could do it internally, and they get the benefit of that design experience that the fintech has put in place.”

“Customers appreciate transactions being made faster and easier.”

According to King, while most banks can't compete with Google or Facebook as far as resources go, they can make significant changes. Embracing a gig economy, where organizations contract with independent workers for temporary engagements, is how many companies are getting the work done.

“Bring in skills where you need them for a short period of time,” he says. “I think that's probably the solution.”

He also suggests reaching out to local universities and tech-savvy graduate students to establish internships that can lead to meaningful employment opportunities down the line.

While many fintechs are finding success in their own fields, there are still plenty of challenges to work through.

“I think the biggest hurdle right now is the discussion around the cloud and identity data,” explains King. “Once we get through some of those challenges, I think you could look at fintech and some of these emerging core technologies as new bank platform capabilities, new extensions of existing technologies — with a very low hurdle technically, in terms of integration, particularly with APIs.”