Financial services are going through a rapid digital evolution to keep up with the needs of digital-native consumers.
The percentage of Americans who use fintech services daily rose from 37% in 2020 to 48% in 2021.
The first step in adopting a new fintech app is to set up a new account. Here is where you can lose those digital native consumers. Slow and time-consuming background checks, eligibility requirements, ACH microdeposits and inadequate credit scores are all major sources of friction and can cause abandonment of the account setup process. Integrating Finicity’s open banking data can reduce friction through secure account verification and eliminate frustrating delays.
“Secure account opening is crucial for financial institutions today. Open banking data can reduce the friction and mitigate the risk associated with digital account opening,” said Andy Sheehan, President and COO, of Finicity, a Mastercard company. “FTA’s integration of Finicity’s open banking platform will further empower consumers to take charge of their financial data and financial futures.”
FTA Partners with Finicity to Add Secure Account Verification and Automated Personal Financial Management Capabilities to IaaS
The agreement with Finicity provides FTA’s customers access to consumer-permissioned account data for secure account validation and ownership when opening new accounts. This allows consumers to connect their primary account to deposit funds into a new investment account. It signals the end of tedious validation methods like micro-deposits, which can take days to clear, and can minimize risk by verifying the ownership of an existing account.
“Integrating consumer-permissioned data from Finicity’s open banking network streamlines account opening and funding, making it safer, easier and faster, which reduces account opening abandonment for our customers,” said David Park, Founder and CEO of FinTech Automation. “It’s a great example of how open banking can improve banking and personal financial management offerings and their customer experience at the same time.”
FTA will also utilize consumer-permissioned data from Finicity’s open banking platform to give consumers a holistic picture of their finances across all their financial and wealth accounts by allowing customers to download all transactions from their wealth account into their personal financial management tool.
Fintech Automation’s Unified Business Platform
The first era of fintech dealt with helping consumers more effectively visualize what is happening with their money across their different account types. In essence, building a better user experience and user interface on top of each of the specific accounts, providing a more user-friendly experience to customers.
While digital apps and interfaces may have changed how consumers experience financial services, the underlying systems facilitating those products and services have not advanced. To meet this growing market opportunity, FTA and its open-loop FinServ Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform offers financial institutions and other fintech companies a banking, payment and wealth management core system of records, bridging multiple financial verticals.
The FTA platform can operate across several financial verticals while bearing the innate complexity, reducing the cost and difficulty of building and deploying financial applications. The platform will allow financial institutions and fintech companies to embed additional services into their existing offerings, providing a better customer experience and an opportunity to drive more profitability.
This enables FTA’s B2B customers to shift the burden of technology to FTA, focusing instead on relationships with customers and offering new types of services. A fast, easy, secure way to launch financial services such as banking, cards, wealth management and payments is critical to increasing customer engagement and revenue.
FTA’s platform offers a one-stop access point to various account types and services through a single point of entry. It also offers regulatory, compliance, and KYC/AML uniformly, while offering a suite of best-in-class providers through a single, secure integration with Finicity’s open banking platform.
Using consumer-permissioned data from Finicity’s open banking platform, FTA is helping FamilyWealthTM, a startup personal financial management and digital advisory firm, to power its growing range of digital financial services that leverage artificial intelligence and automation algorithms to make better financial decisions for their users. FamilyWealth will analyze data to understand users’ spending habits, financial goals and risk tolerance, building a data profile that is used to enhance decision-making while maximizing financial performance. Finance features will include automatically moving funds to the highest-yielding accounts, automating portfolio allocation or paying bills. Key to FamilyWealth to automate finance are improvements in AI and data accessibility, such as financial data including debt, income, spending and investments.