#TheCEOSpotlightSeries: Bankjoy is More Than Another Mobile Bill Payment App

Mike Duncan, is the co-founder of Bankjoy, which provides a mobile banking app for credit unions. However, Bankjoy goes beyond bill payment. Today, consumers look to their phone as the means to simplify their lives and Bankjoy’s additional features include providing an improved customer experience compared to similar products. For example, one feature includes built-in financial goal management, enabling the customer to save for “big ticket” expenses such as a vacation or a down payment on a car. The opportunities are endless. Wayne Brown, Managing Partner of The Walker Group, posed the following questions in an effort to better understand the players in the consumer bill payment sector and companies that are providing innovative solutions that deliver results.

 Why did you decide to launch Bankjoy? We started Bankjoy to bring modern APIs to banks and credit unions. My co-founder and I worked in the banking industry for years and experienced firsthand the challenges of building software for banks and credit unions. We also realized the lack of attention given to user experiences in consumer banking apps, such as mobile banking and online banking. We saw an opportunity to build a banking API as a modern tool to build software and we believed we could demonstrate the value of the API to banks by providing competitive consumer-facing apps.

How do you envision the growth of the company? Today, our API is a powerful integration layer that is connected to a banks core system and 3rd party systems, such as bill pay and check processing systems. Tomorrow, whether financial institutions are offering Bankjoy’s mobile, online, and wearable banking apps or a 3rd party’s apps that leverage Bankjoy’s API, we expect banks and credit unions worldwide to be offering state-of-the-art banking experiences.  There will be no excuse not to; Bankjoy will be a platform for innovation that will help banks and credit unions lead.

How does Bankjoy create “stickiness” for their customers? How stickiness is achieved is simple:

1. As banks and credit unions discover new ways to differentiate themselves by leveraging our API, they will grow an ecosystem of back-office and consumer-facing apps working together on a single platform, saving them valuable time and money.
2. Customers of banks will use our apps to manage their goals and dreams of buying homes, cars, and more, giving financial institutions better insight to offer personalized service and deepen their relationships with customers.
3. Financial institutions develop targeted ad campaigns; the return on their investment is realized as they deploy their ready-made campaigns across multiple channels and measure their effectiveness on one easy platform.

What key points have you learned in running a FinTech start-up?

• Banks and credit unions are generally slow to innovative under their own power.  This is dangerous as there are a number of FinTech startups who are quickly building relationships with Millennials by providing better technology.
• The underlying systems that facilitate money movement and payments needs an overhaul.  Money movement is too slow.
• Banks and credit unions have a lot of data and they need better tools to understand it to offer personalized service to their customers and attract new customers.

What do you think is the greatest threat to banks?  The greatest threat to banks is not knowing their real value proposition. Companies like Blockbuster and Kodak didn’t know their value proposition either, so they were forced to react to new companies that discovered ways to serve consumers needs better. By the time the incumbents reacted, the market was already too far tipped in the new players’ favor.  Bankjoy believes the value proposition for banks should be to help people achieve dreams, whether they are saving for a home, a car, a trip to Paris, or retirement. Banks’ online products need to do their job better.

Most banks and credit unions share the exact same checklist of features in mobile and other online channels. The most innovative feature in most banking apps today is photo check deposit in a time when the number of checks written worldwide is declining rapidly. The winners in this market will not obsess over having the most items on a checklist of features, but instead will obsess over user experience and whether or not their apps are optimized to help customers achieve personal financial goals.

The Walker Group provides business development and advisory services to FinTech companies. Our varied market segments enables us to identify synergies and opportunities to increase revenue as we partner with our clients to build their business. Through our one-on-one CEO Advisory Services, we have helped companies develop and execute a marketing strategy to attract both new partnerships and to raise capital. For more information you can contact Wayne Brown at WayneBrown@waynebrown.nyc.