David Nohe’s Recipe for Tripling Fintech Growth in Six Months

Check out the progress FinGoal has made in the past six months:
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+150 deployments signed/scheduled to go live or already live
+130 are banks and credit union partnerships
+Total volume by users/deployments/revenues have all approximately TRIPLED in the past 6 months

Pretty amazing, right? I recently had the chance to catch up with David Note, CEO of FinGoal, to discuss his company’s fantastic growth trajectory.

About FinGoal: FinGoal looks at transaction data to better understand financial institutions’ customer needs. They focus on serving banks and credit unions, and reach them through partnerships with digital banking vendors. 

They clean the transactions, which is admittedly not a big deal. But from then on the magic starts. They tag their customers with persona tags so ultra-specific and relevant offers can be made. This dramatically increases offer conversion rates - often by 300% to 400%!  

As a simple example, a personal account tagged with small business transactions can be offered a business account. For these business owners, providing education on why that’s a critical step could foster an ongoing trusted relationship.

They then offer a greater frequency and variety of customer-specific offers - once or twice a week instead of every three to six months. FinGoal can proactively suggest: 

• Cash back offers paid for by merchants
• Reward offers paid for by the banking institution
• Offers to negotiate specific subscriptions
• Hyper-relevant financial literacy content as a customer value-add. 

Prior to working with FinGoal, these offers exist but live in different places that the user must independently seek out. Let’s be honest, when was the last time you proactively checked what merchant cash back offer you can take advantage of? In my case, never. FinGoal puts highly relevant offers in front of customers every single time they log-in. 

With the current interest rate environment, a hot offer has been high interest earning deposit accounts. FinGoal has been offering this more, and consumer lending less, during this time. Utilizing customer insights, they determine which users may be the most interested in taking advantage of this opportunity. The tags are primed to adapt to any market fluctuation and help you provide the right offer at the right time.

Pilot test results were killer- 413% increase in conversions- and last month, FinGoal started to talk about this publicly. So how DID they triple their volume in the last 6 months?

Understand your customer timeline and market dynamics. 

To experience high growth, you need to have a lot of patience, fortitude, and market understanding. Be willing to go slow to grow fast when the time is right. This strategy allows you to be patient through natural cadences, and harness times with high growth potential.

The first few customers are very hard to get for a lot of fintechs, and this certainly held true for FinGoal. Credit unions don’t like to be the first one to try something new, but would rather be a “fast follower.” They had to grind it out to get the first few customers and show the success of those customers. Then, they expected to take off. 

However, in March of 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and shook the fintech industry. Almost half of all venture-backed technology companies in the US had been getting banking services through SVB. At that point, FinGoal’s prospective partners basically stopped all spending on new technologies for nearly 12 months. 

But in the past six months, the market has come back strong, reviving older shelved deals, as well as delivering new deals. 

Don’t forget that quality has to reign supreme, even if it costs you more time

The back-log of old demand, plus the surge of new interest led to an unusual situation where FinGoal had to slow down customer deals to ensure the success of their growing customer base. You cannot afford to take your eye off of quality just to grow at breakneck speed. 

Make sure your company culture always puts its best foot forward

I noted to David that his personality probably added to his success. He’s so friendly, helpful, and straightforward, you can’t help but to like him. You want to trust him and be part of his success. 

He laughed and shared with me that being around likable and trustworthy people is something that he places a lot of value on as part of the company culture. He is intentional about hiring people that are “really good humans.” 

He notes that his entire team has really high trust with customers, and that it helps a lot to grease the wheels of progress. He “will not work with jerks, there’s too much work to do to focus on those kinds of problems.” 

So there you have it, folks, David Nohe’s recipe for tripling fintech growth in six months. Be patient when you have to be and grow fast when you can, but not at the expense of quality. And prioritize being a good human.