Plaid and The Harris Poll have released a report, titled The Fintech Effect: Fintech’s Mass Adoption Moment. The report noted that as Fintech adoption approaches “parity” with traditional banking (95% of consumers are banked), it’s also become the main way that most consumers manage their funds.
The report from Plaid and The Harris Poll reveals that usage surged in every category, both “in terms of the percentage of people’s money managed digitally— from 55% to 65% in the U.S., and 67% in the U.K..”
The report also mentioned that usage increased “across the types of Fintech tools used (payments, investing, and saving each surpassed 50% adoption in 2021).”
The report clarified that it’s not just young consumers – “the proportion of Baby Boomers using Fintech more than doubled in the past year.”
Fintech’s move to the center is “happening at both an ecosystem and an individual level,” the report revealed. In 2020, in their inaugural consumer survey, consumers reported that Fintech enhances financial wellbeing, improves access to the financial system, and “enables them to engage more deeply with their finances.”
As a provider of the connectivity that enables fintech, Plaid says that it was “eager to reach back out to the public to learn how consumers’ use of Fintech has changed in the past year.”
The report from Plaid noted that, overall, consumers told them three things:
- Fintech’s value “will keep people digital-first after the pandemic”;
- Fintech “makes finance more inclusive and social”;
- Fintech “integrates finance into people’s everyday lives”.
The report added that addressing “widespread financial challenges remains Fintech’s primary directive.” However, changing the culture of money and “showing up wherever people touch their money positions Fintech to be the new center of the financial universe.”
The report continued:
“With mass adoption reached, nearly every consumer has experienced Fintech. But with no single use case surpassing 70% penetration, Fintech still has tremendous room to grow. As the ecosystem moves forward, Fintech’s impact will continue to stretch beyond financial well-being and inclusion to a full transformation of financial services’ role in everyday life.”
The report concluded:
“Fintech is increasingly being embedded wherever financial information or money is involved – in the foreground and in the background; surfacing in context and at the point of need. So, as we think about ‘The Fintech Effect,’ we need to continue to evolve our perspective and how we evaluate fintech’s increasing impact on financial access, inclusion and outcomes. This mass adoption moment signals that Fintech is no longer separate from the traditional financial system. It is simply becoming the way we do finance, digitally.”
