Introduction: Financial Health at a Regulatory Crossroads
HOST (Jason Henrichs):
Welcome to another week of Breaking Banks. Joining me today are co-host Brett King and frequent guest Jennifer Tescher, CEO of the Financial Health Network, to unpack the newly released financial health standards presented at the Emerge Conference.
These standards come at a time when the financial services industry is confronting:
Heightened regulatory scrutiny

Rapidly shifting consumer expectations

Questions about the role of industry in safeguarding financial health and social equity

QUOTE: “We are at a regulatory crossroads, deciding where moral hazard lies and how the social fabric is impacted.” – Jason Henrichs

Why Do Financial Health Standards Matter Now?
HOST (Jason Henrichs): Jennifer, why is this work so urgent in today’s environment?
GUEST (Jennifer Tescher):
The standards provide a shared measurement framework for financial health, helping institutions benchmark progress, identify gaps, and track outcomes for customers and communities.
Key points:
The standards help move beyond generic ESG metrics to focus on tangible financial well-being outcomes.

They address systemic trust gaps between institutions and underserved populations.

They create a common language for policymakers, banks, fintechs, and non-profits.

From Compliance to Customer Outcomes
BRETT KING:
Historically, banks have measured compliance, not customer impact. The standards flip that focus, prioritizing whether customers are financially healthier after engaging with a bank.
QUOTE: “You can’t claim success if your customers are still living paycheck to paycheck.” – Brett King
Practical Shifts Required:
Linking product design to measurable health outcomes

Using customer data analytics to track behavioral change

Embedding financial coaching and education into digital tools

Defining the Industry’s Role in Financial Health
JASON HENRICHS: So what’s the private sector’s responsibility here?
JENNIFER TESCHER:
Financial health is not just a public policy issue. Industry leaders must:
Build products that align incentives with customer well-being

Take a proactive stance against predatory practices

Partner with regulators and advocacy groups to shape sustainable policies

QUOTE: “If we don’t define our role in financial health, someone else will, and we may not like the result.” – Jennifer Tescher

The Social Fabric & Moral Hazard Question
BRETT KING:
The financial system’s credibility is fragile. Every misaligned incentive, every predatory fee, chips away at public trust, an asset far more valuable than short-term revenue.
Moral hazard arises when institutions profit from customer vulnerability.

Regulatory pressure will only intensify if the industry fails to self-regulate.

Moving from Talk to Action
JASON HENRICHS:
Implementing the standards requires operational resilience and cultural change:
Assigning clear ownership for financial health KPIs

Training frontline teams to recognize and address financial stressors

Leveraging fintech partnerships to scale personalized support

QUOTE: “The future of financial services depends on our ability to make financial health the default, not the exception.” – Jason Henrichs

Closing Reflection
The conversation at Emerge is more than an industry update, it’s a call to action. Financial health standards can be the bridge between regulatory compliance, business sustainability, and customer trust. The question is whether the industry will walk across it before public trust erodes beyond repair.

Raw Transcript:

[Speaker 3]
Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast.

[Speaker 1]
I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks. Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services.

[Speaker 3]
From incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

[Speaker 1]
Welcome to another week of Breaking Banks. Very excited as your host, Jason Henricks, to have my co-host Brett King and frequent guest and co-host of the Emerge podcast, Jennifer Tescher, who’s the CEO of the Financial Health Network, to talk about some of the standards that just released at the Emerge conference. We talk about why this is so important as we are at a regulatory crossroads, as we’re thinking about where’s the moral hazard?

How is the social fabric being impacted? What is the role of industry in looking out for financial health? This week on Breaking Banks, we talk all about how we pave the path forward towards a better tomorrow.

One of the current challenges we’re hearing about again and again, and a theme that keeps coming up is how swiftly the marketplace is changing that crypto, AI, stable coins, tokenized deposits, you name it, the world is moving swiftly. Part of that, regulation historically has had a hard time keeping up. In a time when we’re seeing a fundamental rewriting of the regulatory playbook, in some cases, even agencies being sidelined, put on ice, if you will, it just increases the chances for something to go dramatically wrong.

Now, part of the mission for the Financial Health Network- Put on ice, I see what you did there, Johnson. Yeah, well, I didn’t mean that until I said it, Brett, okay? No commentary there until at least later, but part of the mission of Financial Health Network has always been around how do we actually fundamentally make sure we’re improving the financial health of consumers, not just in the U.S., but more broadly. And Jennifer, I guess, let’s start, you had some big announcements, including a big body of work that came out of Emerge this year, the conference that you do every year that absolutely love kind of the parties it brings and how you’ve evolved that Financial Health Network isn’t just about finance anymore, it is broadly around mental health and physical health and, you know, access to all sorts of services. Why don’t we start with, you know, the announcement that came out this year out of FHN and the Emerge conference?

Well, first of all, I love that you’re getting right into it, but I have to say hi to you guys. I haven’t been on the show in a while and it’s great to see both of you. So thanks for having me back.

And I’m very excited. Yeah. I’m very excited to talk about our work in standards.

And I think what I would say is we happen to be in the right time at the right place. So what we announced at Emerge in June was the first installment, if you will, of what we hope will be a library of standards around how to design financial products and services that help people improve their financial health. Imagine if every product that a financial institution or a FinTech designed was actually designed from the beginning with the customer or the user’s financial health outcomes in mind.

That’s the goal of these standards is to give providers a roadmap, if you will, for how to go about doing that. And so the first set of standards we put out were about checking accounts and credit cards and how to design them to enable people to spend well. So a credit card is also a credit product.

But for the purposes of this set of standards, we’re thinking about it in terms of how it enables people to spend effectively. And same thing with the checking account. And the standards are focused on three categories of things.

The account features themselves, the policies surrounding those accounts, and then the way in which people access and onboard to those products. And my call to action for the audience was to assess yourself and pick a standard you’re not meeting and commit to meeting it. Let’s start with one at a time.

And then in October, we will publish an assessment. We’ve already done an assessment of the five largest banks, five largest regional banks, five largest credit cards, five largest digital banks, all by retail deposit size. And we won’t name names this first time around, because the goal is not to shame.

The goal is to encourage progress. But ultimately, the goal is to develop some benchmarking so we can really see both how companies are doing individually, but how the industry is doing as a whole. I think what’s interesting here is there’s a lot of conversation right now about when we look at the potential for digital to impact in those areas you’ve discussed, Ben.

There’s a lot of and there’s been a debate in Australian Parliament today about this, about the problem we have with social media companies and, you know, open AI today. If you want to reach a customer support officer, it’s not resistance. He’s only got these online auctions.

And it’s clear that banking is going more towards that type of self-service approach. And there’s a debate in Australian Parliament today about post offices and banks not having enough human support, human interface for these things. But I come back to a comment from Henry Marr, who’s the CIO of WeBank.

And he made a really insightful comment to me. This is a couple of years ago now when they were talking about their use of artificial intelligence and customer support, which was, he said, if you’re in the banking experience today and you need to speak to a human, that’s a material design failure of the bank. And I thought that was a really interesting way of thinking about it.

But it takes a design culture and it takes a particularly creative, you know, an innovative approach to design for onboarding and those types of things to really get that right in the digital sphere. The problem I think most banks have today, unlike a WeBank or a NewBank, who score very, very well at this, and Alipay, you know, in China as an example as well, is that we are trying to retrofit traditional processes for onboarding and KYC and so forth into that space. Is that part of the catalyst for these conversations now?

Well, certainly the nature of the particular standards that we’ve developed speak to some of the things you’re talking about. Although I will say, Brett, that while I mostly agree with what you said, I do think money is so inherently emotional that it’s going to be a very long time before we can remove people from the equation. We can talk about how to make customer service better and more efficient and how to do how to enable customers to do things more digitally.

But there’s always going to be a need for someone to talk to someone they know is real. It isn’t some fake scammer, synthetic AI voice, you know, someone real when they have a money problem. But the impetus for these is actually not what’s going on right in this moment.

We just happen to get lucky with the timing, I think. If you think about the trajectory of what we’ve been doing at the Financial Health Network, we’ve been really trying to build a market, build an understanding, build a new way of thinking about how to be in the financial services business. And over the course of time, we’ve helped answer a whole host of questions.

What’s financial health? Why should I care about it? Who are these customers?

What do they really need? What’s the business case? How do I even think about doing this?

How do I organize myself internally to do this? Right now, we’ve exhausted all the questions. And what people want from us, what our members and our stakeholders want from us is the answer.

Just tell me what to do. Like, tell me what to do. Tell me what order to do it in, frankly.

Help me make the prioritization decisions. I have five things I could do. Which one should I do first?

And so this was our attempt to say, here, you want to know what to do? Do these things. There are 20 others you could do.

But these we know from the research, we know that these can have a positive impact on people’s financial health. So let’s start with these. Now, it just so happens, we’ve been working on this for a couple of years.

It just so happens that we’ve put these out into the world at a moment when regulation is in the backseat, if not strapped to the roof of the car. Maybe it’s fallen off the car at this point. Maybe we’ve run it over.

Maybe you drug along, National Lampoon Vacation style. Yes, exactly. And I don’t have to tell you guys that trust is the lifeblood of financial services of banking.

We are in a low trust society and banks are going to have to do way, way, way more to build trust, especially in a world where, like you said, technology is freaking people out and there’s no cop on the beat, if you will. There’s an interesting pace to trust. And how that’s evolving in the digital age.

And you see this in large scale markets. You see this with Newbank in Brazil. You see this with Alipay and you see it with the UPI rails in India.

I’m in Bangladesh here. So with Bcash, for example, the fintech there, where these institutions now have a higher trust rating often than the traditional players in the market. And looking at that, you know, you may remember both of you that I talked about this in bank four is that trust is now very intertwined with maturity.

So if I can deliver the utility of banking when and where you need it flawlessly, then the brand trust is not as critical and not as important in this environment because you can just execute what I need to get done. Now, this is not the case for most banks who have sort of retrofitted their systems on the technology, but native technology organizations. Look at Alipay.

Alipay is, you know, during Singles Day, you know, they’re doing roughly 15x the entire theoretical capacity of the MasterCard and Visa networks globally. They’re doing that flawlessly in November, you know, during Singles Day. So that utility has provided a very high level of trust.

Now, if you but if you don’t get the tech right, then, you know, people are going to go back to brand trust because they want to know who to blame or who to talk to in that environment. But this sort of comes back to this issue of the role of technology. It should be there to improve utility of the banking experience.

It should definitely be there to improve accessibility, you know, to financial services more broadly. And this has happened in these emerging markets where the barrier, you know, that the standards, I guess, were a lot lower. But ironically, now you have higher trust and higher utility from these brands than even the best banks in the United States who are like JPMorgan Chase, who are spending $18 billion a year on technology.

It doesn’t seem to have a correlation. Maybe it’s cultural agility and technical agility at the core of that. But anyway, I just thought I’d throw that in the mix, because when you look at trust in institutions, it’s definitely evolving.

And a Gen Z, their impression of who they trust in terms of financial services access today is going to be very, very different to their parents or their grandparents. Totally agreed. And sometimes I wish that I could do my work only with the new banks of the world, who I love, by the way.

But I’m here in the good old USA, and you know what it’s like here, Brett. I don’t have that luxury. I’m mostly, and even in the fintech world here, right, there’s some real standouts.

But in terms of market penetration, right, I’ve got to deal with the behemoths in banking if I’m really going to drive change. And so I’ve got my work cut out for me. But I would say on the trust piece, I’m not just talking about trust in brands or trust in banking.

I’m a big consumer of the Edelman Trust Barometer that they’ve been doing for over 20 years. And as a world, globally, trust in institutions of all kinds, government, business, NGO, the media is in the toilet. And it explains a lot about the broader geopolitical trends that we’re seeing around the world.

And I really fear that that trend, coupled with the rise of AI, crypto, coupled with seemingly no interest in putting any guardrails on those things or investing in anything around safety or governance, is going to be an enormous disaster. Fraud and scams are already dramatically up just in the last few years of all kinds, through all channels and through all kinds of payment mechanisms. And just wait, right?

We’re already seeing the fake AI voice or image of someone we know and love asking us to take an action. Or in that environment, it’s back to the cash under the mattress for a lot of people, let alone people in this country, immigrants, who are literally wondering whether they should pull all of their money out of the bank because they don’t want ICE to have yet another way to find them. And I am very concerned.

This may sound crazy. I’m very concerned that one day the biggest banks in this country are going to get a knock on the door, a phone call from the administration asking for all of the data on the customers who have ITINs, who have individual taxpayer identification numbers, suggesting that they’re not citizens. Because if you’re looking for the most fresh contact information, that’s where you’re going to get it.

Yeah, that’s scary. That’s scary, Jen. I didn’t think about that, but it’s an obvious area.

No, but it’s an obvious, it’s an obvious leverage point, right? Yeah. I thought this was going to be the happy podcast.

[Speaker 2]
Sorry, Jason, did you have a question?

[Speaker 1]
I thought we were going to improve people’s financial lives. And now you’re taking me down to, I’m going to need four or five more, you know, to turn this attitude around. But Jen, I want to build on, you know, we’re going to fix people’s financial health while the rest of the world burns down around us.

There you go. There you go. Okay.

More optimistic. But the good news, the good news is, having said that, the, I mean, the one thing in terms of financial health that I would advocate is that you will never be able to manage your financial health better than you will with a personal AI that’s integrated into your financial behavior. I couldn’t agree more.

So Brett, this was the question I was going to ask that you led into, is if trust is low with institutions and with our banks, and I trusted the technology companies more, but I think we’re seeing in Edelman, that’s beginning to wane too, do I trust AI more than I trust institutions? Because at least in theory, they are amoral and agnostic to, you know, misaligned incentives to sell me another checking account or to get me into debt to do these things. So I tell you, I did a, I did a, a Chachi BT prompt today.

And I asked, you know, cause I got into the whole Elon Musk, Sam, Sam Holtman feud, and I asked Chachi BT, who is more trustworthy? Elon Musk, Sam Holtman or Brett King. Right.

And of course the answer it gave was Brett King. And if you, if you try it as well, I bet you, it’s going to tell you that you’re more trustworthy than Elon Musk. So part of the problem we have is that AI is going to be very, very good at gaining our trust because it’s going to tell us what we want to hear.

You, you guys might remember in augmented in, you know, the book I read in 2015, I talked about the fact that people are going to feel closer relationships. Some people are going to fall in love with their personal AIs because of this factor. So I think in terms of the trust factor, I think it’s going to be very, very difficult for humans to be more trustworthy than your personal AI that you feel is in your court and your court alone when it comes to financial issues.

See, I get that. And I think that’s true in certain realms. But I think there’s two other factors at play.

One is the initial adoption, right? So we’re not yet in the movie, her. Although some people are, I mean, there have been people who’ve fallen in love.

There’s someone who God forbid, he killed himself because his AI suggested he do so. I mean, like that’s a terrible outcome, obviously. But most of the folks I talk to, there is a lot of work just to get your customers to figure out how to engage with and to trust the AI that they’re putting in front of the customer to help them alongside the product they offer.

So I do think there’s a little bit of overhype in the near term and frankly, underhype in the long term.

[Speaker 2]
I’d agree with that, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
I also, though, I think the place where people hopefully are not going to be too trusting is it just depends on whose behalf the AI is working. So if it is truly your personal assistant, great. But I think for the foreseeable future, most people are going to be dealing with AI agents that have been created by other companies.

So here’s my bank and oh, by the way, here’s an AI assistant that can help you. That AI assistant is trained, you know, to help you…

[Speaker 3]
To maximize bank profits. Navigate their stuff and to maximize, right.

[Speaker 1]
So I love the idea, right, of having your own agent who’s going to negotiate with all these other agents, like I can see that future and I think that’s super cool. I just think that the landmines from here to there, because of greed, are significant. Well, it all goes back to incentives.

We’ve known this since the 70s, right, when the adage that if you’re not paying for the product or service, you are the product, right? We talked about in the 70s with regards to advertising. And the same is true on the if you’re not paying for the agent, if it is free, who does it actually represent?

And not always so transparently. I think, yeah, completely, completely. And I think that’s the other issue is the Black, we don’t, none of us, including the people who are training these bots, fully understand what’s in the Black box or how these things are making decisions.

We just don’t. I’m not convinced we ever will fully. And so the notion of what biases have been trained in, intentionally or unintentionally, like I am very concerned, as bullish as I am, particularly around the finance use case, I’m very concerned about what data are these tools trained on?

Are they trained on the data of people that look like me or not? Are they going to give me advice that is relevant to my situation? Even if I provided my own financial data, is it going to have seen that kind of experience before?

Is it going to have access to data that might be unique to me and is not necessarily free-flowing in the data pools that exist today? There’s a lot to get right here.

[Speaker 2]
Hi, this is Rob Tercik from The Futurist Podcast, which is part of the Provoked Media Network. I’m excited to tell you about some news. The Futurist is expanding into the real world.

We’re doing a live event in Dubai. Now, folks who listen to The Futurist Podcast, you’re going to be familiar with the fact that my co-host, Brett King, has been working very hard in Dubai and other parts of the Middle East for a long time. And for more than a year, he’s been putting together this event.

And now, with the help and support of MasterCard.com, he’s going to be and Emirates, MBD and many other partners, we are putting together the world’s largest Futurist meeting in Dubai. It will take place at the fabulous Jumeirah Beach Hotel in Dubai, and it’ll be on the September 22nd and 23rd this year. So just a few weeks from now, the speakers are going to include some of the world’s leading futurists and forecasters and future thinkers, people like Brian Cox and astronaut Scott Kelly.

Of course, Brett and I will be there to conduct interviews and introduce some of the other folks. We’ve got speakers from around the world. And if you’re interested in meeting futurists in person and participating in an event that attracts the future minded, please join us on the 22nd and 23rd of September.

You can learn more about it at FuturistEvent.com. That’s FuturistSingularEvent.com. It’s all one word.

FuturistEvent.com. And that’ll tell you all about the event. I sure hope to see you there in Dubai on the 22nd and 23rd of September.

Thanks.

[Speaker 1]
So, you know, I think we probably need to sort of bring it back to where your financial health network is taking this now is, you know, where are you at in this process, Chen? And how do you see us navigating the regulatory path to reduce risk in this instance, when currently we’re seeing an administration step away from sort of heavy-handed regulation and that conceivably might add significant risk in particularly in the agentic AI space as it emerges? Yeah.

So first, I should say that alongside this push into standards, I think the other big body of work that we’re taking on is this AI as financial sidekick and really trying to help drive the market to build the kind of tools that we think are going to be best in class for helping people manage their financial lives effectively. And I do think that part of that work ultimately will include some standard setting, but before we can set standards, we really have to define what success looks like, like what is the outcome we want from these tools? What’s the right answer?

The AI tool should give. We need to do more eval, AI eval work to understand what we want the answers to the questions to look like so that then we can work backwards to say, how do we design them to make sure they’re delivering the right answers? I think from there, we can then start to think about some standards.

But I think that in, oh, go ahead, Jason. Quite strong on that, but success for whom? Because success for the institution, the FI, success for the individual and success for the agent may all be different.

But how do we reconcile that? My answer is, right, we need to be building what is the right, if someone’s asking a financial question, there should be a right answer, period. It shouldn’t be the right answer that is best for the institution, right?

I think we need to approach this from a more of a fiduciary perspective. We’re already in a non-fact world, which is scary, right? There are some questions that fundamentally there is an answer.

It should be the same answer for everyone. I think that’s really important. And in fact, one of the things that I think, one of the roles I think we can play as an organization is there are some questions where there isn’t one answer.

There are multiple potential answers. Even like financial advisors would disagree on what the answer is, but like, maybe we should decide as an industry what we think the right best answer is for the consumer. Because no consumer is going to say, oh, yeah, I want to use this, I want to use that.

I want to use the bot that uses this religion, if you will, versus this other school of thought. And that’s not getting in the way of anyone’s competitive opportunities, by the way, right? That’s just like setting the floor so that we feel like the basics are good, inherently good for the customer.

And let people build on top of that. So, but I agree with you that at the end of the day, this is all about incentives. And that’s why I worry about the lack of regulation.

And let me just say, regulation isn’t just important to keep people from doing bad things. It is important to help create an environment that’s safe for innovation. So think about what’s going on with 1033 and open banking.

Right. We’ve now gone from 10 years of work, we started working on this 10 years ago, 10 years of work, a rule thrown out, at least now, we’re going to hopefully get a new rule. But we’ve got to start the process over again.

It’s putting a hold on everything. It allows a bank like Chase to come in and say, we’re going to turn over the table entirely and start charging for data to drive the ecosystem in a particular direction. So.

I’m very concerned about not just there’s no cop on the beat from a consumer protection standpoint, but we’re not creating frameworks and guidelines that enable like industries to know how to make investments, where to go next, where to put their chips. And I think as a result, I think it will slow things down in the financial services world. One of the areas I’m concerned about, which sort of goes back to the whole Cambridge Analytica thing and so forth, is the industry’s view of data ownership.

And you may recall when aggregators first emerged, there was a big case against Chase in terms of access with Yodlee, I think it was, in terms of getting data access. And the same problem exists today in terms of training these financial models for generative finance is how much ownership do you actually have of your own data that might inform these models and inform decision making when it comes to financial advice and things like that. It’s actually interesting.

Brazil has proposed legislation to move from data privacy regulation to data ownership regulation, that everyone will own their own data and that that gives you then a marketplace to market your data in return for better service. But I feel like with the current AI environment, we’re moving further away from that in the United States. That’s really interesting, Brett.

And, you know, some people would say that 1033 out of Dodd-Frank suggested that, yes, people own their own data, their own financial data. The problem is there weren’t a lot of words on the page and the world has changed dramatically since it was written. And I feel like the interpretations we’re starting to see are really starting to narrow and narrow and narrow further what I view as a fundamental right.

So I really like thinking about it that way. But I do feel the need to turn this around because I have a bad habit these days, given the world we’re living in, of kind of being the Debbie Downer. And that would be not a good place to end.

And so here’s what I want to say. Particularly when it comes to the work we’re doing with our standards, I’m going to give you some good news. Small changes can drive big impact.

The things that we’re talking about in these standards may not feel earth shattering, groundbreaking. Oh, my God, never heard this before. This is going to turn the world upside down.

But they are shown to improve people’s financial decision making, financial management and ultimately their financial lives. We know what works. Sometimes small tweaks are all that’s needed to actually enable people to make better decisions or to better manage their money.

And so there is something every institution, every fintech can do right now to make the lives of their customers better. It may not cost a lot of money. It may not take a lot of time in the tech queue, which is great.

We don’t necessarily need to worry that there’s no regulator to bless it. These are things that people can do right now and they will make a difference. When you think about that, Jennifer, about what people can and should do, and let’s talk about specifically the people within the financial institutions, how do they start to move the institution along that this isn’t just a feel good?

What is the actual imperative? There should be a moral imperative, but I think we’ve reached a state of extreme capitalism that the moral imperative doesn’t necessarily hold weight anymore. What is the case for why putting the customer first should be top priority?

Yeah. Doesn’t that sound so obvious? Well, we run a business and that business is meant to help manage people’s money.

Why should we put them first? Doesn’t that just sound crazy? But I hear you.

Yes. There is a business case, like doing right by your customer and giving your customer what they want, which is like, have my back and help me out. Our research shows that they have higher SAT scores, they’re stickier, they stick around longer, they tell their friends about you, and they buy more stuff ultimately, and the more financially healthy someone is, the more they can take advantage of more of your products and services, so this isn’t like rocket science, but I think what’s most exciting in this moment is we’ve been at this long enough that we are really seeing the biggest financial institutions in this country really take this to heart, and this has nothing to do with us anymore, this is being integrated into how they do business. It’s not a little project off to the side, it’s fully integrated into how they design products, how they assess how they’re doing, more and more companies are actually measuring in one way, shape, or format the financial health of their customers, and they’re asking themselves these questions as they design products and services, so you could say, oh, great, you put standards out in the world who’s gonna follow them, how are you gonna make people follow them, that’s a real question, how do we drive adoption? There are lots of possible opportunities and examples, we could do benchmarking, we could create a certification, but the fact is right now, it’s two months in, we’ve put these out in the world, we have institutions, some of the largest in the country, voluntarily saying, oh yeah, we’re gonna assess ourselves, we wanna do as many of these as possible, I haven’t put any carrot or any stick, because they’re deep in this work with us, and they have come to appreciate how valuable this ultimately is for their customers and their bottom line.

Let me spin that, Jennifer, as we think more broadly, as I think about the role of FinTechs, originally it was, we are going to fix the broken system and be customer-centric, and I think that is held true in our design of the interfaces, not necessarily the benefits of the products, I’m thinking specifically about, right, something I’m writing about right now, hopefully to be published before this gets done, but it’s kind of gotten hung up, you know how that goes, adding tips into micro loans and not including it into the APR, which is ostensibly the true cost of the loan, and then those who tip more get loans at a higher rate, they’re willing to pay, and one could argue, and this is the part I wrestle with, is, well, the customer knows, and they need access, it’s in theory better than a payday loan, but are we really solving for customer-centricity in the design of these products, knowing that it has a bottom line impact?

So I would argue the startup in question here knows that it has a good bottom line impact, but is it having a societal bottom line impact? You know, I think we can even ask a narrower and maybe easier to answer question, which is, as you help someone understand how much something costs, is tipping transparent? Is it help create more price transparency?

Does it help people make a decision? Or is it really just a clever way to get around regulation? I don’t think we have to answer the existential question about, like, is this loan product okay because it’s, on a relative basis, it’s better than something else, but, you know, or on an absolute basis, it really stinks.

Like, I think it’s the test of, would I want my grandmother to use this product? Would she understand, like, this tipping business? And does it help her understand how much this costs relative to other choices she has?

And the answer is no. And so where do you look as we’re coming up on time to, how do we create the North Star for organizations and the accountability around this kind of transparency, not just, is it better than, or, you know, hey, the consumers ultimately make them the choice, you know, the old, you know, guns don’t kill people, people do. And hey, they chose to use the drugs, you know, I just, you know, made it available.

How do we actually, you know, from the industry perspective, in the absence of that regulatory leadership, make those things happen? It’s all about incentives, as you said earlier, as a wise man said earlier in this podcast. And we will, we will see sort of the ultimate, the ultimate, the nirvana is when the way in which companies compensate their employees, and especially their leaders, has an element of it related to their customers’ financial health.

And we are starting to see that. I can tell you two companies in particular, one, a top 10 bank, one, a top 10 neobank, that in different ways have built financial health into their incentive systems. And do they call it financial health?

Yes, they do. What do they call it? I mean, this is the positivity I was looking for from Jennifer Tescher.

Not this is the way to bring it home. If you can, you know, how did that come about to be in the incentive packages? So at the end of the day, this is really about who’s at the top of the house.

We can talk all day long about business case. We can talk about regulation, incentives. It’s really about who’s at the top of the house and what do they think is important.

That’s how these things happen, period. And what’s really interesting, these are very different examples. And the way that they, I can’t say very much more about them, but the way in which they play out is a little bit different, but it has just become the fabric of how business is done at these institutions.

And that’s exactly what’s needed here. This isn’t, as you said earlier, a feel good, a special thing, a little project out of CRA. This is just, this is a way of approaching how you do business.

It’s an outcomes-based focus. I love that. And I think that is both a wrap in terms of a great place for us to end with positivity and the direction the industry needs to go.

So thank you for sharing that. And excited to see, hopefully that does become the norm. And looking to see how this idea of an industry-led approach to better standards related to improving financial health and outcomes begins to take root.

I completely agree. Thanks, Jennifer. Thanks, Jason.

Thanks, Brett. Always good to talk to you guys. That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks.

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