The financial service industry is evolving at a rapid pace.
The financial services industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace with advances in technology and changes in customer preferences. Significant advances in data capture and cloud computing fundamentally changed the financial services sector with the emergence of digital-first providers that focus on the needs of specific customer segments and compete based upon their ability to deliver streamlined and delightful customer experiences.
The explosion of available data in the industry continues with consumer-permissioned data, open banking, purchase journeys and many other drivers. Consumer and small businesses expectations have drastically changed and competition between financial service providers continues to accelerate.
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Consumers and small businesses expect financial service providers to keep up with technology.
Advances in technology enable new payment methods, new channels to engage with customers such as embedded finance, and streamlined customer experiences.
Today’s consumer and small business owner is savvier with their use of technology as part of their everyday lives and expect the same from financial services.
How We Serve Our Clients
Growth
Strategy
We help clients better understand market shifts and create differentiated products to position their business for growth.
Innovation in Risk Management
We help clients better understand advances in data tools, and solutions to improve their credit and fraud risk management functions.
Operational
Excellence
We identify industry leading practices and compare these against our clients’ business practices to uncover opportunities for improvement.
Who We Partner With
We believe that all financial service providers can be considered “FinTechs”, regardless of the stage in their lifecycle. Whether you’re a new entrant challenger in hypergrowth mode or an established player who recognizes that the status quo is no longer an option, The FinTech Interactive can help your business develop a deeper understanding of market trends to support today’s savvy customer.
We have relationships with:
- Traditional banks and credit unions: top national, regional, community
- Traditional players enabling the financial service ecosystem such as networks, credit unions, payments processors, merchant acquirers
- New entrant challengers that provide financial service products and services to consumers and small businesses
- New entrant FinTechs that provide technology, data and analytics, and other product solutions to the financial services ecosystem
- Industry advisors – including consultants, lawyers, analysts, and investors, who desire to complement their knowledge and industry reach
Our work focuses on lending and payments on topics such as:
- Credit risk and approaches to credit underwriting, including lending at the point of sale
- Evolution of consumer credit risk scoring, new data/tools to inform credit underwriting such as ML/AI and use of cash flow data
- FinTech and Bank partnerships and their governance
- Economic and credit cycles, trends and shifts in consumer spending and use of credit
- Fraud and credit abuse, online application fraud, identity verification, solution provider landscape
- Opportunities for lending and payments as part of embedded finance
- New products and approaches addressing the underserved and new to credit, financial inclusion, behavioral economics, financial education, retail distribution, use of mobile technology
- Evolution of financial services through Web3 and DeFi
- Regulatory priorities impacting consumer credit including data privacy, data access, transparency, and fair treatment
- Collections strategies and use of technology and communications to optimize customer experience and recoveries
- Dynamics of working with merchant partners during the extension of consumer credit
- Small business account acquisition; sources of data for business verification, shifts in CFPB regulatory posture over small business lending
- New technologies and trends in consumer payments away from cash, such as contactless adoption, unattended payments, mobile payments apps, omni-channel payments acceptance
Who We Are
Kim Gerhardt, Owner and Principal Advisor, has worked and consulted in financial services, lending, and payments for over 30 years. Kim has been working within the center of FinTech and watching the worlds of established players and new entrant challengers come together for over two decades. She’s been watching the trends, watching changes in adoption, and seeing the opportunities these changes create.
She has created and led various risk management industry forums and has worked closely with senior risk executives across traditional banks and new-entrant challengers during this time. She has built the relationships in the industry and was there at the beginning of the growth trajectory of FinTech.
Dedicated to the success of our clients, we will partner with you, collaborate with you, and work with you in an interactive way to drive success. Let’s explore this initial opportunity.