A Recap of Fintech Meetup: Innovating to Keep Up with Customers' Expectations

The annual Fintech Meetup recently took place at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, and we at Dragonfly had a great time engaging with customers and colleagues, and listening to several insightful talks about money movement, transforming payments, open finance, customer experience and more. There were several key themes that came out of the event, including building customer trust and embracing innovation – both of which are necessary to keep moving forward in digital business banking.

Let’s take a closer look at these two themes.

Protecting Customer Trust

Without customers, there’s no business. This may be obvious, but it’s an essential message to drive home. If customers don’t trust you, they will find someone else to bring their business to. Therefore, part of this includes adapting the user experience to keep up with the evolving times, thus making it easy for customers to do business. Often, they don’t want to have to worry about banking technology, and how they are getting their payments through – they have a business to run! One point we heard at the event was that enabling APIs makes it easier for small and mid-size businesses to embed accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) into the FinTechs they use. Then, once these APIs are enabled, the FinTechs and the customers can continue to find their own value and build on it. In addition, we heard from several banks about how important onboarding is to keeping customers engaged and happy. Without seamless onboarding, it’s difficult to keep banking customers engaged, as they will move on to services that offer a better user experience.

One speaker also mentioned that a quarter of small businesses are run by people with a high school education – they didn’t go to business school to learn the trade and how to manage finances. Banks cannot expect all customers to understand the payment processes. That’s why they need to meet them where they are. The digital experience has evolved rapidly over the last couple decades – from printing checks and stuffing envelopes, to automated, real-time and streamlined digital processes. In an age where people can order items online and they show up on their doorstep later that day, they expect the same convenience in all aspects of life – including managing their payments.

Never Stop Innovating

It’s easy to get stuck in the past, utilizing the old way of doing things. But, many businesses are innovating across verticals, and banks and FinTechs need to adapt their products to participate, and keep up, again, with evolving customer demands. In the past decade, cards became the primary way to manage purchases, and more recently, those have gone digital – virtual cards were top of mind at the Fintech Meetup.

These virtual cards, a convenient, customer-centric approach, link to a credit, debit or prepaid account. We heard from several speakers about their use of virtual cards – such as to pay vendors. In fact, large corporates are very active with virtual cards with real-time assurance, which is a 24x7 need. They’re safe and secure, with an automation benefit of enabling straight-through processing. The use of virtual cards were accelerated during the pandemic, and aren’t expected to slow down.

Wrapping Up

A couple other things we heard reiterated at Fintech Meetup up was there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to payments, so banks should remain flexible and continue innovating. And, FinTechs should be actively engaging in direct marketing and training the banks to sell their services to continue building the business and staying in front of relevant customers. This is all great insight to hear as FinTechs continue engaging banks and customers in new ways.

Keep an eye out for Dragonfly at more industry events throughout 2023, including the Barlow Research Client Conference and the Aite Cash Management and Small Business Forum. Will you be at the events? Contact us and keep in touch!