Financial technology providers love to innovate and disrupt, but often the payments technology they design is targeted at a narrow customer base when that tech could potentially help a much broader swath of the public, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic said today. During a fireside chat at an Atlanta Fed conference on payments inclusion, Bostic challenged fintech firms to think big picture when developing payments solutions, saying they are usually “focused very narrowly” on a single use case or target population.
“In many instances, small tweaks can lead to big changes in terms of accessibility, but once you’re too far down the road, going back and doing the tweak can seem like a mountain’s worth of effort,” Bostic said. “So to the extent we can create a process or expectation that among the early questions you ask is, ‘Who else might use this beyond the group I’m thinking about?’ And then maybe trying to find those people, talk to them [and] understand what their challenges are or what their aspirations are. That process will broaden how you think about your innovation and potentially leads to much more smooth and broad adoption down the road.”
Last year, the Atlanta Fed’s special committee on payments inclusion released a report that identified barriers to inclusion and provided recommendations on how to overcome those barriers. One example was the lack of broadband access in many rural areas, which limits what payments solutions are offered, Bostic said. In terms of what the Fed is doing on payments inclusion, he said Fed officials are following developments around the world to learn from their successes.
