On Multiplayer Fintech

Fintech has a lot to learn from products like Figma and Dropbox. Social financial products will have as much in common with Pinterest as they do with Citibank.

finance and fintech have remained stubbornly single-player. We still call it personal finance.

That P2P apps like Venmo, Cash App and even Paypal have emerged despite such headwinds shows the massive need for more bank-agnostic, multiplayer financial tools. And none of these apps allow users to create truly shared accounts.

Taking a more collective-first approach could provide greater financial opportunities and stability, but the toolset is thin.

The problem with joint accounts of all types, for lending, saving, everyday spending, and investing, is that they can be quite difficult to set up, painful to maintain, and don’t accommodate short-term, non-partner or non-family use-cases particularly well.

Want more than two people on your joint account? Only a handful of banks allow that, and a lot won’t let you sign up for one online.

You shouldn’t need to have the same bank as another person to transact with them. Banks haven’t adapted to a world where two people with different primary banks might want to share money for a short project, an investing group or a summer sublet.

This is holding all of us back. We live in the world of my money and your money. Our money isn’t quite here yet, except within the confines of romantic partnerships, families and businesses.

If the primary tool of one’s financial life is the checking account, what’s missing right now is a layer of collaborative tools that live on top of our primary accounts. These tools could allow us to spend, lend, borrow, save and trade together. This is an area of enormous opportunity.