The document discusses building successful fintech startups by reducing friction and creating on-ramps. It provides examples of how companies like Stripe, Square, Coinbase, Revolut, and Robinhood reduced friction in payments, banking, and investing to create access for more customers. These companies analyzed the problems customers were trying to solve and removed steps, simplified pricing and integration to create "highways" and "on-ramps" for users. The document also discusses challenges in building fintech products and how platforms providing modular services could help speed development and lower costs. It argues successful fintech companies have a flywheel opportunity by engaging customers frequently across products to gain better data and expand adjacently.

1. www.productschool.com
Leveraging FinTech
by fmr Revolut Head of Product & Expansion
(US)

2. CERTIFICATES
Your Product Management Certificate Path
Product Leadership
Certificate™
Full Stack Product
Management Certificate™
Product Management
Certificate™

3. Corporate
Training
Level up your team’s Product
Management skills

4. Free Product Management Resources
BOOKS
EVENTS
JOB PORTAL
COMMUNITIES
bit.ly/product_resources
COURSES

5. ADITYA GOEL
S P E A K E R
Current: Co-Founder@
Previous: Head of Product
and Expansion (US) @
Leveraging FinTech

6. My Background

7. A G E N D A
2.
1.
Why reducing friction and creating on ramps are two key principles in product & business design
My product and business philosophy & why it's important to have your own early on? How can you
build it?
4.
3.
Importance of early platform, architecture, and customer data decisions to build a multi-product
company (so you can launch new products quickly).
Why it has been hard to build fintech startups? Why that presents a huge opportunity?
5. Why some of the best companies have flywheels? How can companies reach the $100bn scale?
6. Building leverage

8. My Product & Business Philosophy
From Ray Dalio’s Principles
Evolution of a product, business and person in
many ways are similar

9. My Product & Business Philosophy
● How will this change the world? Is it the most impactful thing I can build at the time based on my interests,
knowledge and what the world needs?
● What kind of 2nd and 3rd order effects will this have? Can it create a new category of entrepreneurs and
businesses that could not exist before
● No. 1 Rule - Reduce Friction at every step. No. 2 Rule - Reduce Friction at all cost
● Democratize access, empower your customers/ audience and enable them to build and grow
● Maintain high velocity of shipping, reduce friction for yourself and your teams
● Do I know my customer? Why would they come to me to solve their problem? Why would they keep coming
again and again?
REDUCE FRICTION EVERYWHERE CREATE ON RAMPS INTERESTING & LARGE PROBLEM

10. Why is it important?
● Key ingredient of product design, how can you remove steps for customer to get the job done
● Evaluate and make tradeoffs, do right by the customer
● Product led growth
● Creates defensibility, loyalty and ability to charge a premium. Big long run moats.
● Streamlines Go To Market, Pricing, Distribution, Hiring
● Helps you run a career marathon and a company that can keep scaling
● Builds leverage for you and everyone around you

11. WHAT IS AN ON RAMP?
An on-ramp is a road which cars use to drive onto a highway

12. What is the equivalent of a highway in Customer’s life?
● Enable access to an asset or capability that you did
not have before or was too expensive
● Enable you to leverage your time, capital, skills

13. Analyzing Principles of Reducing Friction and Adding On Ramps
as key success drivers of Largest FinTech Companies

14. Who is the Customer & What is The Job To Be Done?
How it reduced friction at every step?
How it enables on ramps?
● Developer / Founder / Merchant who wants to sell on the internet and accept
online payments?
● Approval - Long time to get approval from a merchant processor, most small
merchants denied due to high risk of default. With Stripe, it took less than a week.
● Integration - No APIs or clunky APIs from legacy players, takes months to
integrate, requires a full fledged dev team. Stripe’s Snippet code can be dropped in
by anyone
● Pricing - Uncertain pricing / high upfront fee from incumbents. Stripe’s fixed and
pay as you go pricing makes it accessible to anyone
● Any small business/ merchant can now sell on the internet, globally. It
creates a “highway” to the global internet economy opening up new
opportunities, growth and markets

15. Who is the Customer & What is The Job To Be Done?
How it reduced friction at every step?
How it enables on ramps?
● Merchant/ Small Businesses (Coffee Shops, restaurants) to accept card
payments from its customers
● Approval - Long time to get approval from a merchant processor, most small
merchants denied due to high risk of default. With Square, it took less than a week.
● Integration - Clunky UI, required tech team. Simple UI and Dongle enabled a coffee
cart owner to start accepting cards on mobile phones.
● Pricing - Uncertain pricing / high upfront fee from incumbents. Square’’s fixed and
pay as you go pricing makes it accessible to anyone
● Any small business/ merchant can now accept cards vs depending on cash, It
creates a “highway” to the largest in person payment method in United
States.

16. Who is the Customer & What is The Job To Be Done?
How it reduced friction at every step?
How it enables on ramps?
● Anyone who wants to buy and store Bitcoin/ Cryptocurrency securely
● Signup & Wallet Creation - Process was so clunky from signup, wallet creation, key
storage, lack of trust that only very tech savvy could buy crypto. Coinbase made it as
easy as getting aVenmo account
● Security - Fraud and cyber hacks created an environment of distrust. Coinbase’s
wallet experience built trust and ease of use
● Pricing - Uncertain pricing / high fee. Coinbase standardized fee and quotes to
bring more transparency
● Perhaps one of the biggest on ramps, Cryptocurrency’s Market Cap has
crossed over $1Trillion from Less than $100Mn in 2011. Early buyers who
could “on ramp”/ buy crypto have had life changing wealth.

17. Who is the Customer & What is The Job To Be Done?
How it reduced friction at every step?
How it enables on ramps?
● Travellers across Europe sending money from one country to another or
spending via their UK Bank Card paying hefty currency conversion fee in
Europe or outside EU
● Signup - Multi currency accounts were only reserved for ultra wealthy customers of
big banks. Revolut created the most seamless way for anyone to get access to a
multi currency account for free.
● Seamless UX - Revolut’s simple and intuitive app enabled customers to send money
to each other in EU, send money abroad or budget their spending
● Pricing - Uncertain pricing / high fee before. As high as 10% of transaction. Revolut
provided interbank rates with 0 or ~100X times lower fee than banks.
● Enabled retail users and businesses/ freelancers to pay 0 to very little fee to
purchase, sell, send, receive payments globally creating a “global on ramp”
of commerce and money movement.
● Access to online bank accounts, brokerage, remittance at 0 to low fee

18. Who is the Customer & What is The Job To Be Done?
How it reduced friction at every step?
How it enables on ramps?
● Enable anyone to buy stocks in US for as low as $1
● Signup - No clunky application or approval process. Robinhood’s app allowed you to
open an account in 2 mins with no minimums
● Seamless UX - Instead of 10+ screens and complex charts and financial jargon,
Robinhood enabled a 3 click experience to buy any stock
● Pricing - Traditional brokerages charged $5-$10 per trade, making trading only
suitable for wealthy buyers trading in large quantities. Its 0$ commission and 0$
minimums enabled ANYONE to buy stocks.
● Biggest wealth creation in United States has happened through equity.
Generations have been locked out of this due to clunky and expensive
process to buy equities. Robinhood created an “on ramp” to wealth
unlocking where even 10$ could be invested in stocks.

19. Who is the Customer & What is The Job To Be Done?
How it reduced friction at every step?
How it enables on ramps?
● Enable Brazilians access to affordable credit
● Signup and Approval - Instead of a visit to branch in person, NuBank enabled
Brazilians to apply via mobile and web, and used online data vs in person paper
approvals to reduce friction
● Affordable APRs - Leveraging big data to better underwrite, NuBank provided
lower APR credit cards to Brazilians
● Brazil and Latin America has lacked the same access to consumer credit as
US has. Access to affordable and timely credit creates real leverage and an
“on ramp” to better life for customers locked out of access to financial
system and commerce.

20. WHY HAS IT BEEN HARD TO BUILD A FINTECH?
If reducing friction and providing on-ramps are the way to solve problems for the “Customer”,
can we apply same principles to enable other builders to build FinTech companies?

21. Key Components of Building a FinTech

22. It takes a village to build a fintech, most consumer fintech companies take >12 months to
build a compliant product that is robust with over $2mm in capital needed
Payment Rails
Credit Rails
Banking/
Regulatory
Partner
Privacy
Compliance
Legal
Tax
3rd Party
APIs and
Compliance
For a good reading on this - highly recommend Unit.Co’s blog -
https://blog.unit.co/banks-middlewares-and-unit-making-sense-of-banking-infrastructure/

23. CUSTOMER DATA
TRANSACTION DATA
CONTINUOUS RISK SCORING
REGULATORY / BANK PARTNER
THIRD PARTY APIs (KYC,
BROKERAGE, DATA APIs,
INSURANCE ETC)
Modular Product, Data and Services Architecture to scale to new products easily

24. Opportunity to build “As a Service” Platform to reduce time and cost to build in FinTech?
E
a
c
h
o
f
t
h
e
s
e
b
o
x
e
s
r
e
p
r
e
s
e
n
t
a
s
e
r
v
i
c
e
o
p
p
o
r
t
u
n
i
t
y
t
o
w
h
a
t
S
t
r
i
p
e
,
T
w
i
l
i
o
d
i
d
f
o
r
t
h
e
d
e
v
e
l
o
p
e
r
s
.
A
F
i
n
T
e
c
h
S
o
f
t
w
a
r
e
a
s
a
S
e
r
v
i
c
e
s
t
a
c
k

25. Big opportunity for companies to tackle multiple billion $ problems across the FinTech Stack

26. WHY FINTECH COMPANIES HAVE A FLYWHEEL
OPPORTUNITY?
The famous
Amazon flywheel

27. Large Touchpoints for Payments - Ability to engage
with your Customer multiple times
Framework for vertical / horizontal expansion to create a flywheel effect
Higher frequency Data - Better underwriting & risk
analysis, better pricing for customers
Upfront reduction in friction - One time approval
process enables multiple product to be offered later
Marketplace effects - Buyers, Sellers, Borrowers,
Enablers all interact in a transaction. Expand
horizontally to make these interactions and transactions
seamless
Regulatory and License Advantages - One time
investment in this can yield future benefits while
keeping competition out
Adjacent Products in one place makes live easier for
customers - Stripe and Square are classic examples of
this effect

28. Reduce Friction at each
step
Expand into adjacent
products and markets for a
sustainable flywheel
Build On Ramps for
democratizing access
Holy Grail of
sustainable
leverage
Building Leverage
Enable your customers, teams and yourself for maximum impact
Lower Cost, Better Data,
Stickier Product, Loyal
Customers

29. Thank You!
WWW.PRODUCTSCHOOL.COM

30. www.productschool.com
Part-time Product Management Training Courses
and
Corporate Training