Product leaders across markets—from Uber to Google—are adopting banking, payments, and lending. Andreessen Horowitz General Partner, Anish Acharya, believes every company can generate substantial revenue from financial services, and details three questions every fintech product manager should be thinking about.
Who Is It For?
- Having an innate understanding of the customer is central to a product’s success.
- Credit score bands are the best proxy Acharya has found for uniquely segmenting a demographic.
- These bands can build a simple model for the customer segment’s core financial needs.
- These groupings allow for easy A/B test marketing and tailoring of product features.
- Similar groupings can be made with income and other financial attributes.
- Regardless of grouping, each has unique financial pain points for which you can offer solutions.
How Will They Benefit From It?
- Acharya uses a framework from Sachin Rekhi’s Hierarchy of User Friction: How will a feature serve a customers emotional, cognitive, and functional needs?
- Emotional: Customer feels better about an aspect of their finances.
- Cognitive: Customer better understands an aspect of their finances.
- Functional: Customer sees change in an aspect of their finances.
- Functional outcomes are hardest to impact because they require contributions outside of your control.
- Fintech PMs should focus on helping consumers better understand and feel in control of their money.
Will they be surprised?
- Be aware of brand permission and brand stretch.
- Brand Permission: How much trust do customers have in your company?
- Brand Stretch: How much of a stretch is it for your brand to be offering a particular service?
Full Andresssen Horowitz article