Standardizing Fairness and Financial Health
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Happy Friday, Fintech Takers!
I’m delighted to be attending the AI-Native Banking and Fintech Conference next week in Salt Lake, where I will be interviewing Raj Date. If you’ll be at the event, please reach out and let me know! It would be lovely to find some time to chat in person!
I also have a lot of fun stuff cooked up for Money20/20 this year. So much, in fact, that I’ve created a new section at the end of the newsletter to tell you all about it! 👀
- Alex
Standardizing Fairness and Financial HealthCopy anchor linkCopied
Standards assume agreement.
Companies don’t generally adopt standards unless there is broad agreement that the benefit of doing so (creating consistency and/or interoperability across the industry) will outweigh the costs (developing and adopting the standards, giving up the opportunity to go in a different, potentially profitable or differentiating direction, etc.)
Given this, you don’t tend to see the emergence of industry standards until the market matures to the point where the developers of the standards feel that this broad-based agreement is likely.
I mention this because consumer advocacy organizations and public policy shops appear to think that the financial services market has reached a maturity milestone when it comes to fairness and financial health.
Here’s the Financial Health Network, from back in June:
The Financial Health Network today unveiled at this year’s EMERGE conference the first-ever product design standards for the financial industry, an essential step toward integrating financial health into financial solutions. During her keynote, Financial Health Network CEO Jennifer Tescher announced the FinHealth Standards for Spending Management Products, an operational playbook for checking accounts and credit cards, designed to help financial services providers advance customer financial health amid rising economic pressure, a shifting consumer protection landscape, and eroding public trust. Future installments will introduce standards for a broader range of financial products.
And here is Consumer Reports, from just a few days ago:
A new guide by Consumer Reports highlights a number of steps fintechs can incorporate into the design of their products to foster a fair digital economy that benefits both consumers and ultimately their company’s bottom line. CR’s Fairness By Design Playbook is a practical resource that aims to help fintechs build consumer trust, reduce regulatory risk, and encourage innovation by prioritizing fairness beginning with the initial development of new products and throughout their life cycle.
This is really exciting! These organizations (and countless others) have spent years (or decades, in some cases) arguing that fairness and financial health are good for business and that companies should prioritize investing in them.
The fact that they are now shifting their focus from trying to convince the industry of this to providing product standards and playbooks for operationalizing it suggests that the industry (or, at least, these organizations’ perception of the industry) is ready to take the next step.
In today’s newsletter, I’m going to review these product standards and playbooks. However, before I do that, we should set the context by spending a few minutes talking about the current state of U.S. consumers’ financial health.
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According to the Financial Health Network, which has been consistently running a consumer financial health research initiative — the Financial Health Pulse — for the last eight years, U.S. consumers are actually doing slightly better in 2025.
According to its 2025 report, the share of households that were Financially Vulnerable decreased modestly (from 17% in 2024 to 15% in 2025), driven by improvements in saving (the percentage of households that spent less than their income rose from 47% to 49%) and debt manageability (the percentage of households reporting having no debt increased
from 18% to 20%) among vulnerable populations.
This is encouraging, but, as the Financial Health Network notes, it shouldn’t be seen as a significant deviation from the recent past nor as a reason for excessive self-congratulations:
Eight years of Pulse data now show that improvements in household financial health have proved fleeting. Between 2018 and 2025, the share of Financially Vulnerable households hovered between 14% and 17% each year. The only time when the share of Financially Healthy households increased substantially was in 2020 and 2021 – years characterized by unprecedented levels of government assistance and restricted consumer spending at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The financial health gains from these interventions wore off quickly as the government ended much of this support. Only 31% of households were Financially Healthy in spring 2025, consistent with recent years and only slightly higher than prior to the pandemic.
The visual drives this point home even more clearly:
Despite modest improvement this year, the overall trends around consumer financial health remain stubbornly consistent, which means … we still have work to do.
Hence, the push towards product standards.
Designing For a Fairer, Financially Healthier Future Copy anchor linkCopied
Let’s start with the Consumer Reports Fairness by Design Playbook, as it is product-agnostic and principles-driven (whereas the Financial Health Network’s product standards are more focused and prescriptive).
The Consumer Reports Playbook is focused on moving the market towards greater levels of fairness and trust, which, Consumer Reports (CR) argues, will also result in a more innovative and profitable market for providers:
Every interaction shapes a consumer’s perception, and acquiring new customers has become more expensive than ever before for fintechs due to intense competition, trust barriers, regulatory compliance, and complex onboarding. Designing for fairness at every touchpoint builds lasting relationships, drives higher transaction volumes, and turns consumers into word-of-mouth advocates. Ultimately, that leads to business success in the rapidly growing digital economy. Especially as consumers grow increasingly wary of financial risk, they are demanding safe, user-friendly products that keep them at the center.
CR also argues that designing for fairness and trust will align providers’ products and processes with the expectations and requirements of regulators, which will ultimately reduce compliance costs and minimize regulatory risk. This particular argument strikes me as a bit theoretical at the moment, given the state of the CFPB, but not unreasonably so.
To design for fairness, the CR Playbook encourages focusing on six pillars:
- Safety
- Privacy
- Transparency
- User-Centricity
- Support for Financial Well-Being
- Inclusivity
For each pillar, the Playbook makes a set of specific recommendations, along with real, in-market examples for providers to use as inspiration, and some potential metrics that providers can use to assess themselves and their customers.
Let’s briefly walk through each pillar.
Safety
This section includes some fairly obvious data security recommendations (encryption, multi-factor authentication, etc.)
However, it also specifically calls out the importance of communicating to customers how their money is (and isn’t) protected (this seems to be a direct response to the consumer confusion regarding deposit insurance coverage in fintech, as revealed by the Synapse mess) and talks quite a bit about the importance of real-time fraud prevention tools and consumer education (perhaps in response to the growth of authorized payment scams).
JPMorgan Chase, Chime, and BECU are all cited as positive examples in this section.
Privacy
This section feels like it was written by Rohit Chopra, which makes sense given the amount of influence that consumer advocacy groups had in the Chopra-era CFPB.
Many of the recommendations are similar to the principles expressed in the bureau’s Personal Financial Data Rights Rule (minimize data collection to what is essential, make it easy for consumers to see what access they have allowed and revoke that access easily, etc.)
CR cites Plaid as a positive example here (while noting that the granularity of the permissioning could be better), as well as Albert and Klarna.
(Editor’s Note — I did not know that Klarna offers a “sign in with Klarna” service for customers to use with merchants, which apparently includes the ability to share their purchase history data with merchants? Fascinating!)
Transparency
The CR Playbook argues for a level of transparency that is, in my opinion, quite a bit further than where financial service providers are today.
Recommendations include terms and conditions that use plain language (the old neobnak Simple was SO GOOD at this), straighforward and easy-to-understand pricing, explanations of how the product or service that the customer is using work behind the scenes (this would have been illuminating for consumers that were unknowingly using Synapse), and standard, and compliant APR disclosures (many fintech lenders argue, not unreasonably, that APRs aren’t always the most understandable way to disclose pricing to consumers).
Apple, Bank of America, and SoFi are listed as positive examples for transparency.
User Centricity
The recommendations under this pillar seem split between ones aimed at banks (greater use of first-party data, better training for customer service reps, dashboards and user-driven customization) and the ones aimed at fintech companies (robust real-time, multi-channel customer support, focus on customer outcomes in addition to business performance).
Overall, the theme is better, more personalized customer support.
PayPal, Fidelity, and Varo are mentioned as positive examples.
Financial Well-Being
This pillar is a little different.
It contains roughly twice as many recommendations as any of the other pillars, and the recommendations span a wide range.
There are recommendations focused on measurement and metrics (conduct user research, create financial health KPIs, etc.) There are ones focused on customer engagement and habit formation (create financial health metrics/scores/benchmarks for users, promote financial resilience, incorporate nudges into product/UX design, etc.) And, building on a recurring theme, there are ones focused on transparency and fairness (no mandatory arbitration clauses, rely more on ability to pay data, etc.)
CR lists Cash App, Ally, and Brigit as good case studies.
Inclusivity
In the midst of the current political and regulatory backlash against DEI, I suppose you could argue that this pillar is the one that financial services providers will see as the least urgent.
In my opinion, that would be a mistake.
The recommendations in this section of the Playbook aren’t about virtue signalling. They are practical, granular suggestions for making financial products and services work better for all customers.
They include ensuring compliance with web accessibility guidelines, providing multi-lingual customer support (as needed for the customers a provider serves), and incorporating cultural differences into behavioral product and UX design (e.g., peer-to-peer lending and group savings accounts).
Comun, Greenwood, and Chime (second mention!) are all listed as examples for this pillar.
OK, that’s Consumer Reports.
Now let’s get to the Financial Health Network (FHN).
As I mentioned earlier, the standards created by the FHN are much more specific and prescriptive. They focus exclusively on checking accounts and credit cards — the foundation of daily consumer money management — and each standard includes research demonstrating the financial health impact, in-market examples, and implementation advice.
As you can see, there are a lot of standards! Too many for me to walk through each, but I’ll cherry-pick a few examples that I found particularly interesting.
Balance Forecasting
This is all about helping consumers see around corners. If you can give them a view into their expected balance for the month, taking into consideration all known recurring credits and debits, you can empower them to plan ahead. Most crucially, this forward view gives consumers a useful context for thinking about the importance of building up savings buffers.
While FHN lists this standard as only being relevant to checking accounts, I would argue that credit cards play a big role in reducing the visibility that consumers have into their spending and current and future account balances, by moving a big chunk of regular spending “off balance sheet”. Banks and fintech companies should solve for this by either trying to capture both the checking and credit card business of consumers (and building a unified view between them) or by pulling in data from the accounts they don’t have via open banking.
FHN lists Huntington Bank as an example of a provider that does a good job in this area. However, interestingly, the tool that FHN references is one that Huntington built for commercial customers, not consumer customers. This hits on an idea that I’ve long been obsessed with: the biggest opportunity in B2C financial management is to simply port over the tools and processes we’ve already perfected in B2B.
Money Labeling
This one is highly related to budget forecasting. It’s about giving consumers the ability to assign their money to different categories. To “give each dollar a job,” as YNAB, the company cited as an example for this standard, puts it.
In simple terms, think of it as the digital equivalent of the old envelope budgeting method. A way of helping consumers simplify the mental math, plan for expenses, and create psychological commitment to future goals (particularly savings goals, which often require extra motivation).
Spending Limits
This one is also highly related. It’s essentially the experience that a consumer has when they reach into that digital envelope and discover that it’s empty (or nearly empty).
FHN doesn’t go so far as to recommend that banks and fintech companies prevent consumers from overspending. However, they do recommend allowing consumers to set limits tied to different conditions (transaction size, volume of spending, spending at specific merchants, etc.) and to be notified when they are either approaching those limits or exceeding them.
Apparently, Discover offers this feature on its cards, which I didn’t know, but I do think it’s very cool (and I hope Capital One doesn’t kill it).
Payment Due Dates
All credit cards should allow users to pick their payment due dates!
This is such an obviously good idea that I’m honestly shocked it hasn’t become a universal standard yet. According to FHN:
One study found that enrolling borrowers in a debt repayment schedule aligned with their income resulted in a 27% decline in late payments and a 10% increase in amounts paid toward debt compared with those who did not align payments.
I know credit card issuers make money on revolving balances and late fees. I understand the economic incentive not to do this. However, this really feels like a standard that we can, collectively, rally the industry to adopt more broadly.
Trusted Contacts
As the rate of consumer-authorized scams increases (particularly those targeting vulnerable populations like the elderly and consumers with disabilities) and the technology leveraged by the bad guys becomes exponentially more sophisticated (LLMs for fraud are huge right now), this standard is quickly becoming essential for all banks and fintech companies to adopt.
Here’s how FHN recommends implementing it:
Let customers designate someone they trust, like a family member or caregiver, to view account information without full access to funds, helping monitor for scams, accidental transactions, or unusual spending.
And while FHN doesn’t list any specific, in-market examples, there are (thankfully) a bunch of companies working in this area, including True Link, Charlie, and Carefull.
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As I wrote at the beginning of this essay, standards assume agreement.
Consumer Reports and the Financial Health Network clearly believe that there is a broad enough agreement in the industry on the importance of building products that are fair and financially healthy that it makes sense to develop standards.
I hope we prove them right.
MORE QUESTIONS TO PONDER TOGETHER
Big news for the endlessly curious (yes, you): I’m collecting your fintech questions on a rolling basis.
What’s keeping you up at night? What great mysteries in financial services beg to be unraveled? Think of it this way, if a stranger is a friend you just haven't met yet, your question is a Fintech Takes conversation waiting to happen.
One that could headline a Friday newsletter or be answered in an upcoming Fintech Office Hours event.
Drop your question here, whenever inspiration strikes!
MONEY20/20 SPOTLIGHT
It’s officially Money20/20 season, which means I’ll be highlighting a handful of (rotating) sessions, meetups, and happenings in every newsletter.
Some I’ll be at, some just look too good to miss. You’re welcome!
🏀 Fintech Takes The Court @ Money20/20 | 10/26 | 10:00am – 1:00pm PT
We’re playing basketball, baby!
Join us for a high-energy 3x3 pickup game, hosted by Fintech Takes & SOLO. All are invited - female, male, young, old, seasoned, out of shape. Bring your A-game (or just your sneakers) and come play or hang courtside with fellow fintech enthusiasts. RSVP here.
💰 Deepfakes, Real Risk: Fighting Fraud in an Age of Synthetic Identity | 10/26 | 3:00pm – 3:30pm PT
I’m thrilled to be moderating this discussion at Money20/20, featuring the head of fraud at Varo and the co-founders and CEOs of SentiLink and Oscilar.
🍸 Fundbox After Hours | 10/27 | 7:30pm – 9:30pm PT
Come for the conversation on the future of embedded finance and small business lending. Stay for the one-on-one conversations (over drinks and appetizers, of course!)
FINTECH TAKES: BUILDERS SUMMIT
As you may know, Fintech Takes is hosting our first-ever in-person event on November 12th and 13th in the mountains outside Bozeman, Montana.
The Fintech Takes: Builders Summit is the industry event that I’ve always wanted, but have never quite been able to find. We are bringing together experienced founders and operators from banking and fintech — the folks who are actually building products in our industry — and giving them the content and networking opportunities they need to find (and understand) the next big problem they are going to tackle.
If that sounds like something you’d be interested in participating in, apply to attend or hit reply to this email to get more information on sponsorship opportunities. We still have room, but it is going fast!
Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email.
— Alex
