About
Writer. Podcaster. Researcher. Consultant.
Aspiring to be the most curious person…
Articles by Alex
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BaaS Platforms and Embedded Finance: Long-term Friends?
BaaS Platforms and Embedded Finance: Long-term Friends?
By Alex Johnson
Contributions
Activity
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Big news from last week - Pagaya is acquiring Theorem Let's unpack this story by asking and answering a few questions. 🤔 What do Pagaya and…
Big news from last week - Pagaya is acquiring Theorem Let's unpack this story by asking and answering a few questions. 🤔 What do Pagaya and…
Shared by Alex Johnson
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#Fintech is dead? Not so fast. One trend I have been monitoring closely is the debit card numbers of the top fintechs. I was lucky enough to have a…
#Fintech is dead? Not so fast. One trend I have been monitoring closely is the debit card numbers of the top fintechs. I was lucky enough to have a…
Liked by Alex Johnson
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Got to spend a few days last week in Cleveland with Panacea Financial’s leadership team. When you’ve been remote for 9+ years, it’s always incredibly…
Got to spend a few days last week in Cleveland with Panacea Financial’s leadership team. When you’ve been remote for 9+ years, it’s always incredibly…
Liked by Alex Johnson
Experience
Education
Volunteer Experience
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Co-Founder
Facing Credit: Zoot Enterprises & CreditQA
- Present 17 years
Education
Facing Credit teaches students how the credit system works in the United States and how understanding that system can enable them to make smart decisions about their future. Since its implementation in 2007, Facing Credit has been taught in dozens of high schools to thousands of students. The program has received positive responses.
Manhattan High School is excited to have a credit education curricular unit available to our teachers and students. Credit is part of everyday life and most…Facing Credit teaches students how the credit system works in the United States and how understanding that system can enable them to make smart decisions about their future. Since its implementation in 2007, Facing Credit has been taught in dozens of high schools to thousands of students. The program has received positive responses.
Manhattan High School is excited to have a credit education curricular unit available to our teachers and students. Credit is part of everyday life and most consumers do not fully understand the variety of credit available. It is important for students to understand how consumer credit works to avoid pitfalls and problems associated with credit to protect their financial well-being. In this age of technology, it is also important to understand how to protect personal credit ratings and personal information from identity theft and other fraudulent activities. It is my hope that the curriculum provided by Zoot Enterprises will assist our staff in teaching this important information to all of our students.
—Bob Moore, principal at Manhattan High School.
The program is composed of 4 one-hour modules and includes a variety of multimedia and interactive elements. All modules are taught by Zoot and CreditQA employees. Facing Credit is sponsored by Zoot and CreditQA and offered free of charge to participating schools.
Publications
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EMV in 2016: Breaking Through the Bottleneck
Mercator Advisory Group
Mercator Advisory Group's newest research report, EMV in 2016: Breaking Through the Bottleneck, provides an updated outlook on the U.S. EMV migration, including estimates for the issuance of chip credit cards and the distribution and activation of chip-accepting point-of-sale (POS) terminals.
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Has Google Removed a Key Barrier to Mobile Onboarding?
American Banker
A small change to the Google Android operating system may have a big impact on the design and development of banks' mobile account opening and onboarding processes.
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Bad News Comes in Threes: Assessing the Future of Marketplace Lending
Mercator Advisory Group
Mercator Advisory Group's research note, Bad News Comes In Threes: Assessing the Future of Marketplace Lending, delves into the myriad of negative developments that have converged recently around the largest U.S. marketplace lenders— OnDeck Capital, Lending Club, and Prosper Marketplace—and provides an outlook on how those developments may reshape the marketplace lending industry (and its intersection with traditional consumer and small business lending) over the next 12 to 18 months.
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Premium Credit Cards: How to Hit a Small, Moving Target
Mercator Advisory Group
Mercator Advisory Group's report, Premium Credit Cards: How to Hit a Small, Moving Target, updates key statistics on affluent and high-net-worth consumers. It analyzes statistics that are fundamental to card product development in the U.S. market such as market growth, product ownership, and monthly and yearly card spending by cardholder segment. The report also reviews recent developments in the major card networks’ product platforms and provides an update on new features and benefits of…
Mercator Advisory Group's report, Premium Credit Cards: How to Hit a Small, Moving Target, updates key statistics on affluent and high-net-worth consumers. It analyzes statistics that are fundamental to card product development in the U.S. market such as market growth, product ownership, and monthly and yearly card spending by cardholder segment. The report also reviews recent developments in the major card networks’ product platforms and provides an update on new features and benefits of leading issuers’ superpremium offerings.
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Mobile Account Opening: Adjusting to a New Normal
Mercator Advisory Group
Mercator Advisory Group’s research report, Mobile Account Opening: Adjusting to a New Normal, reviews the trends driving consumer demand for and FIs’ interest in mobile account opening (MAO) and outlines the challenges and potential solutions for enabling MAO for different financial products and customer use cases.
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2016 Outlook In-Depth: U.S. Consumer Credit Cards
Mercator Advisory Group
Mercator Advisory Group’s latest research note, 2016 Outlook In-Depth: U.S. Consumer Credit Cards examines the continuing trends and emerging innovations that are expected to shape the profitability and strategic plans of U.S. credit card issuers in 2016.
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Company Snapshot: Wallaby
Mercator Advisory Group
The anemic adoption of traditional, budget-based personal financial management (PFM) services suggests that an alternative approach is needed to add value to customers’ financial decisions. Wallaby represents an emerging approach to financial wellness that doesn’t try to answer the question “Should I buy that?” but rather “How should I buy that?”
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Small Business Credit Cards: The Key to Richer Customer Relationships
Mercator Advisory Group
Mercator Advisory Group’s research report, Small Business Credit Cards: The Key to Richer Customer Relationships untangles the seemingly contradictory state of the U.S. small business credit card market and provides a set of strategic recommendations for market participants moving forward.
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A Thought Experiment: Could Credit Cards Disappear?
Mercator Advisory Group
A new wave of financial technology (FinTech) services—for shopping, payments, and financial management—is making it possible for consumers to conduct the vast majority of their day-to-day transactions without ever touching their credit cards or contacting their issuers.
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Migrating to EMV: The (Not So) Final Countdown
Mercator Advisory Group
Mercator Advisory Group’s research note, Migrating to EMV: The (Not So) Final Countdown, provides an updated outlook for EMV credit card issuance and point-of-sale (POS) reterminalization as well as an overview of the trends and challenges currently constraining the U.S. migration to EMV.
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The Disruptive Potential of Marketplace Lending in the U.S. Consumer Credit Card Market
Mercator Advisory Group
Mercator Advisory Group’s research report, The Disruptive Potential of Marketplace Lending in the U.S. Consumer Credit Market, explores what exactly that disruption will look like, both in terms of the impact to the $3.4 trillion U.S. consumer credit market as well as the broader strategic implications for established banks and credit card issuers.
Other authorsSee publication -
PaymentsJournal Perspective: Consistency is Key to Surviving the Era of Consumer Complaints
Mercator Advisory Group: PaymentsJournal
One of the hallmarks of our modern, post-recession regulatory environment is the consumer complaint. While people have been grousing about their banks for as long as banks have been around, the recent effort undertaken by regulatory agencies to solicit, catalogue, and respond to those complaints is truly unprecedented for any industry.
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It's Simple: Banks Need to Build Better Apps...Or Buy Them
The Financial Brand
Increased competition from challenger brands is disrupting the financial industry. Seamless digital banking has a long way to go. BBVA’s recent acquisition of Simple illustrates the importance of this movement and what it may take for banks to get there.
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PaymentsJournal Perspective: Amazon.com Raises Consumers' Service Expectations...Again
Mercator Advisory Group: PaymentsJournal
Amazon.com is a disruptor. This is well established. In a little under 20 years, they have become the world’s largest online retailer. They have ushered in seismic (and often calamitous) changes for their traditional competitors across a huge variety of industries—books, music, consumer electronics, even groceries and IT outsourcing.
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PaymentsJournal Perspective: The Search for the Credit Card's Replacement: Part 2
Mercator Advisory Group: PaymentsJournal
In Part One of the search for the credit card’s replacement, I evaluated Square’s payment product—Square Wallet. In Part Two, I will be evaluating Brett King's new start-up Moven.
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PaymentsJournal Perspective: The Search for the Credit Card's Replacement: Part 1
Mercator Advisory Group: PaymentsJournal
To put mobile wallets through my “Jurassic Park test” and see if they really should be built (and if consumers should be adopting them), I have spent the last couple weeks testing emerging mobile wallet products—Square and Moven. In a two-part series I’ll walk you through what I have learned, starting with Square.
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Collections & Credit Risk Viewpoint: Rewards and Risks of the Strategic Defaulter
Collections & Credit Risk
One of the more interesting challenges lingering for financial institutions in the aftermath of the recession is the mysterious strategic defaulter.
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PaymentsJournal Perspective: The Next Generation of Cross-Sell
Mercator Advisory Group: PaymentsJournal
Cross-sell is, and always has been, a core component of financial institutions’ business strategies. However, in today’s market—with lenders looking to grow their credit portfolios and the competition for new customers remaining incredibly fierce—the idea of deepening wallet share with existing customers is even more attractive.
Projects
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Industry Brief: Meeting Consumers’ Mobile Expectations: Skate to Where the Puck is Going
The expectations of consumers, particularly Millennials, when it comes to mobile banking continue to evolve and financial institutions’ mobile offerings need to keep pace.
Other creatorsSee project -
Industry Brief: Better Data to Make Better Decisions
The stakes for making good account origination decisions have never been higher. With competition over the most profitable customers reaching a fever pitch, financial institutions (FIs) need to be able to make the right risk/product/price/relationship decisions. In order to make the right decisions, FIs need access to the right data. This industry brief will discuss the critical role that alternative data is starting to play in FIs’ account origination decisions.
Other creatorsSee project -
White Paper: SaaS or In-House
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This white paper explores how Zoot’s software as a service (SaaS) approach overcomes the sacrifices when choosing between software developed completely in-house or outsourced software deployed in the vendor’s hosted environment.
Other creatorsSee project
Languages
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English
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Join now to viewMore activity by Alex
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(Fintech Takes 3-2-1 Newsletter) STORY #1 A group of Senators and Representatives in the U.S. Congress are proposing a new law: 🔹 A bipartisan…
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Here's some interesting news 👇 A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators and Representatives have unveiled new legislation that would direct federal…
Here's some interesting news 👇 A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators and Representatives have unveiled new legislation that would direct federal…
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🚨 Hello FinTechers & Payments Leaders 🚨 -- I need your help to find out where you get your payments news & events: Link 👇…
🚨 Hello FinTechers & Payments Leaders 🚨 -- I need your help to find out where you get your payments news & events: Link 👇…
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