Читать книгу Embedded Finance - Scarlett Sieber - Страница 28

Embedded finance is an improvement upon fintech, because companies who are already successfully employing embedded finance already start with a significant customer base. Throughout its history, despite all the headlines and money pouring into the space, fintech has struggled with customer acquisition, which represents one of every fintech company's greatest costs. Part of this has to do with low virality of fintech apps compared to social and other types of apps. How many times a day do you scroll your social feeds, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or Snapchat? What about your banking app? When you do open your banking app, how long are you engaged for? You might tell a friend about a new social network because you want them to join and having them on the platform with you enhances your experience. But, you don't tell your friend about a hot new lending app that will help consolidate your credit card debt, because talking about debt or even wealth can be awkward and uncomfortable and there typically isn't an opportunity for you and your friend to connect and collaborate on the app.

The exception is with peer-to-peer apps, in which you need the person on the other end of the transaction to be part of your network. Another exception is investing and cryptocurrency services, in which people enjoy sharing expertise, and information can be shared without sharing dollar amounts.

There are signs that Gen Z consumers will show greater openness about money and have a greater comfort level sharing personal details, but it is still early in their financial lives. This is certainly true of platforms like TikTok with the craze of “FinTok” and “Finfluencers” including Queenie Tan who, as of January 2022, has nearly 120,000 followers, and Andres Garza, also known as @capital_inteligente, as of January 2022, who has nearly 1,000,000 followers. They openly talk about once taboo topics and make the concepts of financial literacy cool and relatable.

We saw this movement of open sharing for younger generations with the peer-to-peer payments app Venmo, owned by PayPal. Venmo was an early experimenter in making its interactions shareable, encouraging users to invite their friends from other social platforms and making payments fun by adding emojis as descriptions for transactions. It has since made privacy more of a default, but part of the app's original value proposition was showing friends where and how you were spending your money. P2P companies like Venmo are still growing. To quantify the scale of a company like Venmo, Venmo did 2.6 billion transactions worth $159 billion in 2020, 56% higher than the previous year.¹²