Concept for a Fintech Product & Identifying a Gap in the Market [Republished]

The convergence of UI/UX design, tech, data management, and money management that is fintech budgeting software may stand to be improved - here's how...

August 16, 2022
Samuel Pawlak
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Intro

[Update] This article was originally posted as a LinkedIn Article on September 8th, 2021. I've re-posted to the blog as a reference piece given the project's progression. Before diving into this concept, I wanted to quickly note why all of a sudden I'm posting about a fintech related concept product since I've never made any mention of this interest or industry. The world of fintech products has actually been of tremendous interest to me since 2016 (i.e. when I began building and managing my own spreads). I love the convergence of UI/UX design, tech, data management, and money management that this industry creates....And I think it potentially could be improved a bit. Concept laid out below.

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The Current Market

When managing personal finances, I’m finding that I have to choose between a (usually) enjoyable UI/UX with fixed/rigid data points, or a raw spreadsheet with infinitely customizable data points and a very labor intensive UX. I could be totally alone on this, but I’ve used software such as Mint, YNAB, etc, and find no value in any of them because the software lacks an interface that allows me to actually derive meaningful information from my own data like a spreadsheet can. You’re basically stuck using their business’s philosophy and UI, and although these applications do update in real time(ish), there’s not much value in real time data if I can’t do anything with it.  

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Current Workflow

At the moment, I currently find value in managing my own spreads (in Numbers on Mac and also Excel on PC) and manually updating them, creating my own formulas, and ultimately building data sets that reflect exactly what I need to know, not just generic account info. The problem is the latter, manually updating. This process is quite time consuming. Tiller Money and Money in Excel appear to be the only two businesses that offer real time data streams (via Plaid) for Excel and Google sheets only. However, I don’t believe I’m alone in openly stating that I probably utilize only 20% of what a program like Excel or Numbers is truly capable of. I’m also not a fan of the utilitarian style spreadsheet UI either. Numbers for Mac is much better on this front, but offers no plugins for realtime data (because Apple).  

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Market Gap & Proposed Product Concept

What I feel I may have done is identified a gap in the market. How substantial I have no idea (could be worthless). But put simply, if there was a program that had only the common features and functionality of an Excel/spreadsheet software, a beautiful and fun to build with UI, and had all of the real-time data already built in and being fed to it for use as the user sees fit, that would seem to be the perfect middle ground product. Build it, tailor it, set it, and forget it type model. I have a plethora of ideas for other features I won’t dive into here, but that’s the barebones concept.

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Or to use a web development analogy - if Intuit Mint is a fixed Wix template, and Excel is coding a website from scratch, I’m looking for the Webflow platform in the world of personal fintech products (for which there doesn’t appear to be one) - A Lego set for finances.

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Early Product Development & Inquiring for Feedback

Out of nothing more than a deep interest and passion for this topic, I built out a prototype UI in Adobe XD to better understand the work flow and UX (late last year) - A system that lets users easily and freely build out exactly what they want while also giving them full control over all incoming data from all accounts and payment rails.

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However, before I place a lot of effort into this and start developing a working prototype or assembling a team, I wanted to know if a platform/program as described sounds like something you would personally use for your own finances.

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Am I describing a real problem?

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What would your perfect personal finance program look like, and what do you currently use?

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Would appreciate your feedback! Feel free to DM me, comment on the post, or share with others. Thanks!

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Sam

About Sam

I'm just a designer, for lack of a better term. An okay designer at that, nothing special. There are still plenty of places I stand to improve. The only people who do tell me I'm better than just "okay" tend not to have a project budget. 

Creating is at the absolute core of what I love doing. Branching out from this core love of building are the domains I find deeply interesting, and thus worth creating things within. These namely include the domains of motorsports, art, design, and digital systems. Divergent topics for sure, and the list is only getting longer. 

I'm still continuing to explore these domains through the businesses I operate, learning a great deal as I go along. I've found the fastest way to learn about something you're truly interested in is to start a business around it. An LLC can be quite a useful tool.

I created this website to openly document my observations, talk about fun business concepts and ideas, discuss past business experiences, and formulate rough models about how it all functions. I find writing to be a tremendously helpful exercise in working through ideas and information. I hope these write-ups and blogs also help in your own endeavors too, whatever they may be.

To learn more about how I got here, enter the Time Machine