Ep. 136 - Digital Onboarding: Fintech's Most Underrated Innovation, with Jas Shah

Liam Gray (0:05)

Hello and welcome. I'm Liam Gray, co-host of The Payments Shed Podcast, here live from Lisbon at Fintech Meetup Europe. I'm joined by Jas Shah, Fintech strategist and writer of Fintech Under the Hood. Would you like to give everyone a quick intro, Jas?

Jas Shah (0:18)

Sure. Great to be here, Liam. Great to be at Fintech Meetup in Lisbon. Yes, I'm Jas Shah. I've been working in Fintech for coming up to 20 years now, and all of that time has been helping build products. Building products myself or building products for other organizations, or helping scale and grow Fintech products, and just create products people love.

In terms of origin story, which makes me sound like some sort of super villain, hopefully a Fintech superhero. I started out as a computer scientist. I was writing code on a pension funds trading desk for about a year, and I realized it wasn't really for me. Then moved very quickly into product. Built products inside shoulders, built them inside Fidelity, worked five, six years at Citibank. Then after that period at what people call TradFi, traditional financial services, I had a few friends who were building, in 2017 they were building like PFM apps, things connected to open banking which was on the horizon. And just talking about this thing that was called Fintech, I think we started a little bit earlier.

And yeah, I was just like, they were like, can you come on and help us build this thing? We know you've built products before, we've worked with you. And it kind of stemmed from there really. I've been helping companies, startups build products for the past nine to 10 years.

Liam Gray (1:48)

And can you tell us a little bit more about the Fintech Under the Hood transition, how that came to be, who you are writing for in particular?

Jas Shah (1:55)

Yeah. I mean, it kind of says it on the tin. Under the Hood is, it kind of lifts the lid, goes under the hood of what the things in Fintech are, like how does a payment work and why should people care? Like what happens when you tap a card? All of the things you see on LinkedIn now, where you've got this snazzy AI-generated infographic, lots of that comes from the work I've done over the past seven years, writing explainers, doing step by step of, okay, you tap your card, how does it go from your, the network to a processor, to your bank for authorization, back to the terminal, how does settlement authorization happen? So it was really, it was really from working on projects that were building cards and standing up a neo bank, where I had to explain to maybe junior product people in the team how all these things worked, or maybe an engineer who was a great engineer, but not a great Fintech person, like why do you care about latency, or why should you care about authorization codes? And I thought, I'm explaining this thing to multiple people across multiple projects, like repeatedly, I should just create this thing that's a one-off that I could just share with them. But next time I go on a project, I'll go, right, we're building a neo-bank.

Here are the fundamental things we need to know about cards, about core banking, ledger, authorization, compliance, KYC, KYB, lending.

And it's kind of an amalgamation of my career in a newsletter. And now some of it is speculative, so it's like, what would happen if a prompt was on the front of your bank and you didn't have a balance in transactions? So it's a bit more speculative now, but it kind of goes under the hood of how things work, but also under the hood of trends like stable coin, how is that going to impact us and where the future is heading.

Liam Gray (3:54)

And let's talk about one specific issue that's come out. You've said that one of the most underrated innovations is onboarding and how we're moving forward in that space. Can you tell us a little bit more about that issue that came out and what the sort of crux of it was?

Jas Shah (4:11)

Yeah. Again, it came from the fact that I'd built around eight or nine digital onboarding journeys through different companies and for different reasons. Some was a kind of internet banking product being turned mobile, and some were just improvements to a journey, or some were greenfield digital bank builds that required onboarding.

I was looking at a number of onboarding journeys, and I actually just went through an onboarding journey for my dad. So he was opening a new account. And the first thing that it said was onboarding minutes. And I was like, that's so true. Like, I can open an account, sat on the bus or in a car on the way to somewhere, or I could be walking to a coffee shop. And by the time I get to that coffee shop, I could have onboarded, have a card issued to me, fund that account, and pay for that coffee. It's like, that is crazy compared to where we were 15 years ago.