Dow 30 36, Nasdaq 15, Russell 2, Crude Oil Gold 1, Silver CMC Crypto 1, FTSE 7, Nikkei 29, Read full article. Josh Smith. If you've been looking for an easy way. Recommended Stories. Motley Fool. Yahoo Finance Video. Pageonce wants to do all of that, while allowing users to take advantage of push notification bill reminders, the ability to pay bills from any checking account, debit or credit card, while offering full bill presentment and free phone support. Essentially, this means that customers can now save and instantly view the actual statement from the biller on their phone and access archives for all their bills.

In turn, users can schedule their bill payments ahead of time rather than having to pay them in realtime, allowing them to control when their money leaves their accounts. As to how the startup is making money? This customizability around saving triggers is intended to help users set up psychologically motivating saving goals. To do that, Qapital is taking its flexible rules system and building on top of it with a collection of features designed to let users use the money they deposit into Qapital better.

Options for allocating saved money include:. Now, not only can you save your rainy day fund in Qapital, you can get your paycheck directly deposited into your Qapital bank account so you can spend money on your Qapital debit card.

And you can take a predetermined amount of that money out every month and deposit it into investments, allowing some to compress their entire financial life into one app. While the conventional wisdom of mobile apps may be to unbundle, Qapital is growing fast by going in the opposite direction — and in doing so, offering users a more convenient experience and a platform for saving.

Professional financial advice is beyond the reach of many consumers. Albert set out to change that by making financial advice and guidance on money management more accessible.

Albert is a financial management app that combines automated savings, investment advice, and financial planning tools. The app brings together many of the most popular wealth management features of other fintech products. Its savings product is similar to automated savings apps like Digit.

Its investment product resembles that of robo-advisors such as Betterment and Wealthfront. Its financial planning tools offer the cost savings and automated negotiation features of Trim.

This broad functionality helps Albert appeal to users with lots of different financial goals — creating an ideal pool of potential customers for financial advisors. The launch of Robinhood was a major internet event, with a waitlist of more than 1M people signed up to use the product before it was ever released. It was a shot across the bows of companies like Coinbase 43M users worldwide that have established themselves as early incumbents in the cryptocurrency space.

In comparison, Coinbase — the most popular cryptocurrency wallet on mobile at that time — charged a graded fee based on the size of your transaction:. Many cryptocurrency exchanges charge a percentage fee, from something like 0.

Those exchanges displayed in this chart from Bloomberg typically need to draw some kind of profit from cryptocurrency trading — hence the fee — but Robinhood, because of its profitable stock trading business, opted not to. Right now the products are investing products, so crypto slots in very nicely alongside the 10, plus other instruments that people can trade. The company did, however, expect that offering a no-fee crypto trading experience would bring a lot of new users to the Robinhood platform.

But Robinhood has been able to tap into a much larger market by making products free and offering them to more people. Opportunities are found where you can give people what they want better or faster than others. Uber got people from point A to point B faster. Google got them information faster. The PFM space is one where there are a lot of wants not being met by providers. Many Americans want:. Most importantly, they can make it as easy as downloading an app. Acorns is a financial planning app that makes it easier to invest your money.

Micro-transactions like these are a time-tested way to skirt the ordinary human reticence around saving. But what Acorns taps into is the positive potential of this phenomenon.

Rather than reward you for compulsive behavior, Acorns harnesses micro-payments and the associated dopamine rush from making them to help you save. In a society no longer tethered to cash, the piggy bank is little more than a symbol.

But it embodies a desire for simple financial discipline that Acorns is able to not just harness, but amplify. So every time you do that pleasurable activity spend money , your brain releases dopamine. At the same time, Acorns adds your money into your investments. The two activities become associated, forming a potent feedback loop that lets you harness your natural inclinations toward beneficial long-term ends.

Gradually, you begin to associate positive feelings with saving, rather than spending. Acorns shows us how human tendencies can be bent towards responsible ends. Stash, on the other hand, shows us how a product can simply make it easier to fulfill the responsible desires we already have.

Stash has grown fast. Of its 5M accounts, it added approximately 1M between January and September alone. Where Acorns productizes the piggy bank investment ethos, Stash productizes the ethos of portfolio diversification.

That lets you build a portfolio much more easily than in an app where you must buy a discrete unit of stock like Amazon. The returns on these funds are much higher and much more reliable for most than trying to build a portfolio manually, especially when accounting for retail investor psychology.

Researchers looking at , stock purchases found that people made systematically poor decisions in how they chose to repurchase previously held stocks, often making intuitive but ultimately unwise pickups of individual stock. Investors that trade more often also tend to lose more money, on average, than those who trade less.

It prompts users to think about advances in various fields:. Robotics, clean energy, and aerospace are seen by many as pretty safe bets as industries — though, as individual companies, perhaps not. You can lose a lot of money as a retail investor betting on a company in one of these sectors.

But invest in an exchange-traded fund ETF that holds a variety of aerospace and defense assets, and you could be looking at better risk-adjusted returns. With a social media-based ETF made up of stocks like Facebook and Snapchat, you might see a similar phenomenon. Rather than investing in stocks, you invest in ETFs — exchange-traded funds, or securities that rise and fall with the value of their underlying asset or commodity. If Acorns is the app that lets you invest without thinking, Stash is the app that helps you think more intelligently about where you want to invest and learn more about your different options.

By opening up the way people think about investing, and yet constraining the options presented to relatively safe investments likely to produce good outcomes, Stash gives users the best of both worlds.

Investment app Robinhood transformed the landscape of the investment industry by offering zero-commission trading. Gold offers enough flexibility to make it an attractive option for confident or experienced investors, but the terms by which margin loans must be repaid encourages responsibility on the behalf of the investor. Personal savings app Qapital hired a behavioral scientist to help the company make its app as effective as possible — long before such hires became commonplace at fintech startups.

Dan Ariely, chief behavioral economist at Qapital, is a Duke University scientist known for his work on choice and rationality. On the flip side, you can also enable a rule that will reward you for indulging modestly, triggering a deposit to occur every time you come in under a certain spending target. The attention to detail that Qapital has paid to the user-facing psychology of the app has paid off. Qapital launched in as a personal financial dashboard — essentially as a simpler version of Mint.

That first version of the app shut down. Today, Qapital has 2M users. For Ariely, one of the biggest issues with saving is that we lose track of what we want to save the money for. That helps motivate you to keep save more and spend less. You go to the supermarket and you buy and buy and buy. People always underestimate. Even the cashier underestimates.

Qapital offers users a wide variety of different rules they can use to determine how and when they save money. Another thing that sets Qapital apart are the methods of saving it offers. Many apps offer features like rounding up money, but what Qapital offers is a more powerful and flexible means of setting rules and triggers. YNAB is one of the oldest financial planning web applications on the market.

Initially, YNAB was a rudimentary spreadsheet-based tool that users downloaded and installed. The app was relaunched as a contemporary web and mobile app in , bringing it in line with the rest of the fintech software market. YNAB aims to help its users better understand their financial situation; automated tools may work for some fintech products, but YNAB instead focuses on ongoing financial education to help users make more informed decisions about their spending and saving.

This not only prepares users for what to expect while using the product but also builds trust in the YNAB brand. By being upfront about the commitment involved, YNAB is priming new users for a lasting relationship. Helping users make better financial decisions can be enough to win over customers initially. But then getting them to recommend you to friends is critical to success. The most popular PFM tools supercharge their referral programs by making them all about self-improvement — and apps are exploring this in new, creative ways.

Fintech is a space where it can be harder to make referrals happen, however. The progenitors of viral growth through referral, the Facebooks and Zyngas, succeeded largely because their products gained value as more of your friends got on them. Your personal finances are personal. In a casino, the house always wins. But imagine if compulsive gambling was good for your financial health. Imagine if pulling it brought you assets that would appreciate over time and improve your well-being in the long run.

Instead of giving you money when you refer a user, Robinhood gives you a share of stock selected at random from a pre-populated list of options. The program was popular on sites like Reddit, where Robinhood users got together to share thoughts on the stocks they received or were hoping to receive for their referrals.

Naturally, the users who got stock others were excited about floated to the top of these threads, confirming for others that valuable stocks were being given away in the program and stirring up a bit of envy.

Walking through the thought process of receiving a stock reward helps clarify why it would work for Robinhood:. Receive a share of Apple stock today, and its value could double, triple, or quadruple within the next several years. Stash founders Brandon Krieg and Ed Robinson knew they had to lower the bar to investing if they wanted to get people to start using their product. They built their referral program to address these hang-ups. McKenzie and Liersch found that people systematically expect their savings to grow linearly, not exponentially.

They have trouble wrapping their heads around the fact that compounding growth is the latter:. Liersch and McKenzie found that simply pointing out the implications of exponential growth could encourage people to start saving more, and earlier — and Stash employs a similar strategy to help people understand why they should be investing. Acorns, on the other hand, helps us see how even a modest, non-viral referral program — optimized with various UX best practices — can be a serious driver of growth.

As of February , Acorns has nearly 9M accounts. That was far cheaper than your average PFM tool. Acorns provides strong incentives to share, optimizes the process to make sharing as likely as possible, and ensures that payouts correspond with actually active new users.

First, Acorns offers a solid incentive. That money gets deposited into your Acorns account and is available for you to start using immediately. Second, it optimizes the UX around referral and makes it as easy as it can be.

Too many companies just tack referral on, assuming that their incentives will do the work of motivating users to actually pull the trigger.

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