“There’s no silver bullet.”– Product Management in Fintech, a Tech Thursday recap

Last Thursday, Tech Thursday and Product Calgary hosted a panel on Product Management in FinTech. The panel featured were Neta Pyasi, VP of operations at Benevity, Spencer Yarnell, product lead at Neo Financial, Maxine Smith, product management, manager at Symend, Maryheth Cabrera, co-founder and head of product at Woveo, and Jeff McPherson, executive director of product management at Morgan Stanley ShareWorks.

I’m Phillipe Burns, the talent marketing lead at Neo Financial, and the lead organizer of Tech Thursday events in Calgary and Winnipeg. The following is my recap of the event’s top ideas and insights, which were condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Neo Financial is a financial institution that offers Canadians credit, savings, investments, and mortgage products.

Benevity is a platform that provides charitable donation-management and grant-management.

Symend leverages the science behind consumer behavior to enable hyper-personalized collections touchpoints for their clients.

Woveo is a community wallet that enables customers to build credit history, using a rotating savings model.

Morgan Stanley at Work, or ShareWorks as it’s more commonly known, is a platform for companies and employees to manage equity compensation.

Jeff: What is fintech to your company?

Neta: At Benevity, we pride ourselves on being trusted. For us that means building financial tools for money movement that are reliable. If you make a charitable donation through Benevity, you have to be confident that the money is going to the right organization.

Maryheth: We’ve built a community wallet for newcomers to Canada. We’ve created lending circles, or groups of people who pool funds together, this enables them to access interest-free loans. We then report the lending circles payments to credit bureaus to enable our users to build their credit.

Maxine: We’re not a traditional fintech, we’re an omni-channel communications tool that provides clients with tools to communicate to their customers.

Spencer: We build B2C, B2B, and balance sheet solutions for our banking partners.

Jeff: Our product is essentially online banking for shares. We sent transaction instructions and move money around.

Jeff: What did you have to learn to get up to speed?

Neta: I learned that there’s magic when you start building products closely with the tax and legal teams. Everyone up here operates in or closely adjacent to heavily regulated spaces. You don’t think tax and legal is that fun, but there is awesome innovation here. For example, we took the traditional model that high net worth individuals used for their charitable organizations and found that we could offer that same model to clients who aren’t high bet worth. Our US foundation partners could support this kind of donation to everyone, which really unlocked our growth.

Maryheth: My background is actually in film in Columbia. I started making horror movies. Then I moved to Canada and started working in startups on the marketing team. But as you do when you work in startups you take on a lot of roles. That’s when I started in product management, that’s when I learned that financial regulations were a big thing, everything from KYC (know your customer), fraud, anti-money laundering, and credit risk systems. We used methods to verify users, getting good at this helps give your banking partners peace of mind.

Jeff: It doesn’t take six months to get ramped up in fintech as you’d expect from other industries. I think it took me four years. Financial regulation and how those regulations vary across regions is incredible. Even what they call shares is different in France, Germany, and Australia.

Jeff: How do you build trust?

Spencer: There’s no silver bullet. Just a lot of lead bullets. For us at Neo, we focus on partner-led growth. Especially in Canada, there’s often more trust in retail brands than banks. Which is why we’ve focused on partnering with brands like Tim Hortons and Hudson’s Bay. We learned that no one moves their money right away, so you have to build products while asking the question of “How would a customer use this product if they only had one transaction a month?” This really lengthens your acquisition timeline. You also have to work with banking partners to know what they care about. You can’t build products that are so different that you can’t integrate with banks.

Neta: When you’re dealing with banks, the baseline is trust. In fintech, you kind of forget about that, you want to innovate. But there’s a fiduciary responsibility. So what does it mean to build trust? It’s a combination of timeliness and accuracy. Embedding that into your organization is powerful but not just on you to build, there are ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and reconciliation tools that you can use.

Jeff: What user differentiator do you see in your space? Do you use personas?

Spencer: I was working at SkipTheDishes before, and for the most part everyone orders food the same way. There might be some variation but hungry people largely go through the menu, select their food, and pay. People bank in wildly different ways, we developed a quite simplified way to think about how different people bank. Largely there are two axis, where one is high or low assets, and the other axis is high or low cashflow. An example would be holds – if you’re cashflow negative you know exactly what the hold time is on every type of deposit into your account, but if you’re cashflow positive, you likely don’t even know what the hold times are. APR (annual percentage rate) is quite similar.

Jeff: In equity compensation there are a few different customers who all have different motivations. Largely these are public companies, private companies, rank and file employees, and executives. Private companies' motivations are quite different from public companies. We help private companies as much as we can across the chasm to get to the New York Stock Bell.

Maxine: We love personas. I think about my persona almost every day. Her name is Patty, she wears a wool sweater. I think about her all the time.

Jeff: Is AI in your roadmap?

Maxine: We see AI playing a huge role in efficiency. It will help to build products, features, and content. As PMs we need to identify market opportunities. AI is changing customer expectations, AI will help us get them better products. Things are changing all the time, as PMs we have to embrace it.

Question from the Audience: How do you think about building your roadmap?

Spencer: You have to think about where your company is trying to go. At Neo, if we’re trying to get to 10 million customers, and for example, we only have 1,000. Well, I could go and ask my current customers what they want from our products, but it’s just as valuable, if not more valuable, to ask people who didn’t go with Neo, “Why not?”