Innovation and data security is the prime need of the fintech industry. Find out how Bond is delivering both!
We are pleased to catch up with Roy Ng again to hear about emerging new fintech trends in 2023 and how Bond is responding. Our previous interview covered his background in depth and what led him to co-found Bond in 2019.
1.Tell us about Bond and what are the core values on which the organization is built.
Bond is a leading banking-as-a-service platform that provides software and fintech businesses with APIs and program management to offer integrated financial products to their customers. Since the company’s inception, our mission is to advance financial innovation and inclusion. The core values on which we built Bond are simple but very powerful: we are trusted partners with our customers, offering customers transparency, flexibility, and complete visibility and control over the data running through our platform.
It was important for us to be both bank and vendor agnostic. From day one, Bond was built to support a marketplace of banks and technology vendors. Our platform is highly customizable and enables brands to offer tailor-made financial products for their clients while dramatically lowering risk.
2.Being a strategic leader, how do you plan to further Bond’s mission of democratizing access to financial services?
Bond is the only full-stack embedded finance platform in the market enabling our customers to offer secured consumer charge cards via a single platform. We are proud to be leading the way in helping to deliver innovative new cards for financially at-risk consumers. As we discussed in our previous interview, the United States has more than 150 million individuals deemed financially at risk. In response, we are seeing an increasing number of fintech and technology companies looking to issue secured credit cards to their users.
The factors that are accelerating this trend include
1) A tightening credit environment makes unsecured cards more difficult for consumers to qualify
2) Growing consumer interest in building credit or improving their credit profile via a secured card instead of using a debit card
3) Finally, many fintech companies are looking to generate additional revenue streams and secured credit solutions provide attractive interchange revenue opportunities for them and present a more attractive CAC than unsecured cards.
3.What is your opinion on integrating technological advancements like AI and ML with financial services? And how has this change brought about disruption in the industry?
Within financial services, the first major commercial application of AI and ML was used to monitor credit card fraud and has been used for ages.
For example, Bond leverages AI in our KYC Identity verification process. Computer vision scans documents that are uploaded to extract information to match more quickly and detect fakes.
4.Kindly elaborate on the emerging trends of the new generation, and through Bond how you are fulfilling the ever-evolving needs of the financial products.
We will see a tipping point for embedded finance in 2023. Recent research shows that the majority of consumers are interested in financial products from their favorite brands, and these consumers say they spend more with brands that offer embedded financial services.
Embedded finance as a category in 2021 accounted for 5% of total US financial transactions, or $2.6 trillion. What many people may not realize is that the vast majority of that $2.6 trillion is on the merchant-acquiring side. An enormous growth opportunity is on the issuing side. Bond is focused on this greenfield space and has some exciting new white-label initiatives coming up in the next year to lower friction to adoption.
And as the industry matures, we’ll start to see regulators and fintech companies begin to introduce new consumer guardrails which will be beneficial and healthy for the entire financial ecosystem.
5.Being an established leader, what would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs and leaders aspiring to venture into the fintech industry?
The exciting thing about being an entrepreneur in fintech is that the industry is constantly changing.
Being at the intersection of financial services and tech, there is always something new to learn and experiment with.
My advice to anyone looking into fintech is to always be curious, be open to learning about new models, and have a global perspective. While there are geographic differences in fintech, many countries outside of the US have innovated in unique ways from which we can learn.
6.Can you share with our audience your new year resolution for the year 2023 and how do you plan to work it out?
My new year resolution is to continually learn and be a better entrepreneur and CEO, and at the same time, learn and be a better dad for our two young toddler-aged boys.
