I’m amazed. And I’ll tell you why.

Just a couple of days ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop with some friends, and I happened to log into my mobile banking application to check if all was swell before pay-day.

On the way, I quickly opened up Billguard to check out my spending habits from the month prior. Needless to say, November looked much, much sweeter (damn you, Chrismukka and New Years!).

My massive holiday spending wasn’t what amazed me. Rather, two things struck me as remarkable:

  1. If we, as consumers, were to sit down for coffee a few years ago and have a conversation about pursuing financial transactions via our telephones, well, the idea would seem deathly scary.
  2. With the mass adoption of mobile, in a very short time from now, we will be engulfed in a generation that won’t even remember a world before mobile.

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These two facts present an amazing opportunity for Fintech companies to leverage new behaviors of mobile consumers, particularly the millennial generation, the biggest and most diverse generation to date, at nearly 89,000,000 in the United States.

Now is the Time for Fintech

In the past few years, financial services have quickly transitioned to being central to the experience of mobile.

With the rapid rise of mobile and millennial understanding of finances, Fintech has an edge-in to become a significant player in the technology market. Today, we, as consumers, now feel comfortable pursuing important financial transactions on our smartphones.

But, if you think the Fintech landscape has seen unprecedented changes in the past few years, wait until 2020. McKinsey has already reported that the industry will see monumental growth in 2016.

New Behaviors Present New Advantages for UX Professionals

There is a large gap between how millennial users expect to interact with services and how they behave and act with traditional financial institutions; so, this presents new advantages and challenges for UX professionals.

  1. UX professionals are entering a very rapidly growing, saturated market.
  2. UX professionals will become business literate, now more than ever.
  3. UX professionals will seek opportunities by turning toward product management.

With that, what other advantages and/or challenges will UX professionals experience in Fintech in the coming years?

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