WHAT WE BELIEVE
We invest in ideas and innovations that disrupt legacy structures, shape the system for the better and help customers achieve financial health and prosperity.
Our investments follow five Fair Finance principles
Why This Matters
People need financial services to achieve their goals: going to school, buying a car, getting healthcare, and more. While these services should be empowering, they are often complex, hard to understand and difficult to use.
Failures of finance can reach beyond the finance system itself, affecting every facet of life. By contrast, when people receive financial services designed to improve their unique circumstances, their economic prospects improve.
Key Elements for Success
- Financial services are designed to be easy to understand and designed for lay people, not experts.
- Financial services are suited and connected to people’s real-world needs: managing cash flows, seizing opportunities, and minimizing risks.
- Financial services are relevant to and built into people’s daily activities: payments, savings, credit, and insurance are integral elements in the non-financial aspects of everyday life.
Why This Matters
To trust financial providers, people need to believe that these firms are on their side and serve their interests. Yet, traditional financial providers are often not transparent.
In particular, revenue practices are a major source of confusion, making business models that are clearly aligned with their customers’ interest a key to gaining and maintaining trust.
Key Elements for Success
- Providers deliver “value clarity” to customers. There are no hidden fees or undisclosed third-party payments. People know how much they pay and what they receive.
- Businesses incentives are designed to help customers succeed. Their revenue models and customers’ financial health are mutually supporting, reinforcing trust.
- Financial firms are transparent with customers about their decision-making.
Why This Matters
Financial services and products increasingly rely on individual financial and nonfinancial data, creating new opportunities, and new concerns about privacy, security, and trust.
A fair financial system will give people control over their data, increasing their level of trust. Properly designed, this can be achieved while also allowing businesses to use the data necessary to tailor their services.
Key Elements for Success
- People have the clearest possible understanding of what data is held, who holds the data, with whom it is shared, and how it is used.
- A robust, effective permissions system gives people the right and ability to control access to their financial data and to easily move financial accounts among providers.
- Appropriate security protocols protect people’s financial data and apply to any party holding consumer financial data.
Why This Matters
To participate in the modern, digital economy, people need access to financial infrastructure.
Expensive, hard-to-use infrastructure discourages innovation and competition, and transfers cost to customers. Open infrastructure makes new solutions more readily available to a greater number of people at quicker speed and lower costs.
Key Elements for Success
- Modern financial infrastructure is characterized by a set of open API tools and protocols that reduces entry barriers and fosters competition.
- New digital infrastructure strikes the right balance between public and private ownership to maximize innovation and accountability.
- Private-sector providers leverage a common, low-cost stack of infrastructure technologies and focus on creating new applications that deliver distinct customer value propositions.
Why This Matters
Regulation and policies are hard to update as technology changes. Regulators are less likely to respond in consumers’ best interests when they don’t understand the risks and benefits of new technologies and data-driven services.
As a result, regulators may not be timely in responding to market failure and abusive practices, or in enabling customer-friendly innovation. Regulation and supervision will need to evolve in parallel with financial services as these services become digitally native.
Key Elements for Success
- Policymakers and regulators apply and enforce the principles of consumer benefit, value clarity, and open system’s architecture.
- Regulators leverage the same digital technologies and approaches that they regulate and supervise.
- Regulation and supervision are consumer-centric, adaptive, and based on the nature of the service rather than the organizational structure of the provider.