Hey, fintech fam! 💜

I’m writing to you from the Amtrak quiet car as I head back to New York from Washington, D.C., where I had the honor of speaking on Capitol Hill about why women must be shaping blockchain policy.

Having Fintech Is Femme and our community represented in that room mattered. Blockchain doesn’t need more billionaires positioning themselves as visionaries. It needs women — the ones building, governing, and solving actual economic problems — at the table where the rules for the next generation of finance are written.

Standing there, even for a moment, felt like a reminder of how far we’ve come — and how much further we’re about to go.

Now I’m headed back to New York because tomorrow we’re hosting the official launch of The Trust Club, a new Humans of Fintech mini-series presented by Middesk.

Make sure you’re subscribed to the Fintech Is Femme YouTube channel so you don’t miss an episode, and follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram — we’re about to roll out a whole wave of new content, behind-the-scenes moments, and the conversations you’ve been asking for.

For the first episode, my guests and I are fully styled in pieces from our venue partner Rag & Bone. Because fintech can be nerdy, but here — we’re proving it can also be cool, cultural, and editorially stylish.

Because if we’re going to continue shaping the culture — from Capitol Hill to catwalk energy — then we should also look and feel like the future we’re building: intentional, bold, inclusive, and fun.

Let’s get into it.

INNOVATION

Fintech Wants Speed. Consumers Want Safety. Consumer Reports Says It’s Time to Crash-Test the System.

There’s a specific kind of quiet that hits when you think your money just vanished.

Mine arrived last year on an otherwise normal afternoon, when a fraud alert pinged my phone. A supposedly “urgent” withdrawal notice from my account. Within seconds, panic set in. I froze my card. I dialed customer service. I braced for impact.

Then came… nothing.

No follow-up.

No timeline.

No clarity.

Just silence.

The fraud turned out to be fake — a phishing attempt. But the feeling was real: a sudden, sharp loss of trust in a financial system I’ve spent a decade covering and championing.

A massive fintech neobank I trusted had left me alone, vanishing at the exact moment I needed them — no follow-up, no explanation, just a vacuum. And in that gap, something essential broke.

And if someone like me — a journalist who reports on fintech daily — could lose confidence that quickly, what does that say about the millions of people trying to manage their money with the tools we’re all building?

It’s a question that’s becoming impossible to ignore across the industry. And it’s the question at the center of a new initiative from Consumer Reports, the 88-year-old nonprofit known for crash-testing cars, rating appliances, and defining what “safe” means for millions of American households.

Now, CR is crash-testing fintech.

The same way they crash-test SUVs, baby car seats, and kitchen appliances.

And honestly?

It’s long overdue.

Because in 2025 we would never:

– Drive a car that hadn’t been crash-tested.

– Plug in an appliance that hadn’t passed a safety inspection.

– Put a baby in a stroller without impact-testing standards.

So why do we treat fintech — the technology that holds our savings, paychecks, benefits, funding, and identities — with less rigor?

At Money20/20 in Las Vegas, I sat down with three Consumer Reports leaders who are stepping directly into that void with their Fairness by Design Playbook, a blueprint for building financial products that are safe, transparent, equitable, and trustworthy by design:

Delicia Hand, Senior Director of Digital Marketplace at CR and former CFPB official who helped shape federal consumer protections.

Johnny Mathias, Director of Corporate Strategy & Engagement, who helps companies operationalize CR’s standards.

Evan Feeney, Associate Director of Corporate Engagement, responsible for taking CR’s product testing into the real-world trenches of fintech.

Together, they’re trying to bring something to fintech that it has never truly had:

Independent crash testing before products scale.

Fintech Skipped Road Testing. Consumers Paid the Price.

When CR first began evaluating P2P apps in 2022, they flagged issues that seemed minor at the time — inconsistent disclosure practices, confusing language, and missing clarity around FDIC insurance.

“People asked why FDIC clarity mattered in a P2P app,” Hand told me. “Then 2023 happened.”

Five banks failed in a matter of months.

$50 billion in uninsured deposits evaporated.

Fintech users didn’t know whether their money was protected — or where it even lived.

Hand continued:

“Fintech enters the market without road testing,” she said. “When you skip that stage, the harms can be catastrophic.”

Not “unfortunate.”

Not “suboptimal UX.”

Catastrophic.

CR saw it coming because they test fintech the way they test cars: Drive it fast. Push it hard.

Simulate the failure before it affects real people.

Where does the app break? What happens during fraud? How clear is the off-ramp?

How fast does money move when things go wrong?

And most damningly: Does the product protect consumers under stress — not just in ideal scenarios?

Fintech’s answer, so far, has largely been: no.

The Playbook: Fairness as Infrastructure

CR’s Fairness by Design Playbook lays out six principles that fintech companies should design around from day one:

1. Safety

2. Privacy

3. Transparency

4. User Centricity

5. Financial Well-Being

6. Inclusivity

Unlike most industry frameworks, this one is not vibes and values. It’s:

✔ Product behaviors

✔ Metrics

✔ Tests

✔ Policies

✔ Evidence

✔ Real-world use cases

“Digital finance moves too fast for a reactive model,” Feeney explained. “If we want a fair ecosystem, we need guidelines companies can use proactively, not after harm has occurred.”

This is foundational — because fintech’s biggest vulnerability is not the tech itself.

It’s trust.

Fintech Used to Build So People Would Come. Now It Must Build So People Stay

Hand offered what may become the defining insight of fintech’s next chapter:

“Fintech used to build so people would come. Now you need to build so people will stay.”

Think about that shift.

The last 10 years of fintech were dominated by:

• Acquisition

• Growth hacks

• Slick onboarding

• Cash incentives

• UX gymnastics

But today?

Retention is the real battleground.

And trust is the strategy.

Consumers are:

• financially anxious

• exhausted by fraud

• wary of data-sharing

• quick to abandon financial providers

• more informed than ever (thanks to AI and comparison tools)

Trust has become a competitive differentiator — one the industry has not been crash-testing for.

Transparency: The Failure Mode Everyone Underestimates

When I asked which principle fintech struggles with most, Hand didn’t hesitate:

“Disclosure is no longer an effective consumer protection tool.”

We all know this is true.

No one reads 27-page terms.

Consumers click “agree” just to get to payday.

And in the most critical moments — during fraud, fees, account holds — the information that matters most is often buried, missing, or incomprehensible.

“Consumers deserve better than 3.5 point font on a five-inch screen,” Hand said.

Transparency is not paperwork. Transparency is design.

It looks like:

• clearly marked off-ramps

• plain-language alerts

• clear timelines

• expectations not buried in legalese

Privacy: The Most Underused Growth Strategy in Fintech

Johnny Mathias has reviewed dozens of fintech privacy policies, and he sees the same pattern:

“Privacy is treated as a compliance exercise instead of a relationship builder,” he said.

In one product review, CR found a company giving itself permission to record audio from the user’s device.

Why?

Leftover legal language.

No real purpose.

A trust-killer hiding in plain sight.

When CR flagged it, the company removed it — immediately.

A tiny fix with massive trust implications.

Mathias emphasized:

“Users will share their data if you tell them exactly what you’re doing and mean what you say.”

The companies that win the privacy era won’t be those who collect the most data — but those who collect the least with greater intentionality. 

Financial Wellness: Fintech’s Biggest Gap Between Marketing and Reality

Every fintech claims to “improve financial well-being.”

Very few measure it.

Feeney broke down the gap:

“There’s a difference between marketing financial well-being and actually supporting it,” he said. “Companies aren’t tracking whether people’s lives are improving.”

CR wants companies to measure:

• financial health indicators

• vulnerability scores

• the impact of nudges

• whether consumers are making better decisions over time

And most importantly:

Don’t upsell credit when someone is financially unstable.

Common sense. Rare practice.

Fraud: The New Consumer Experience — and the Perfect Crash Test

Fraud is no longer a one-off event.

It’s a constant drumbeat (these days, my morning alarm is just a chorus of “Scam Likely” calls).

Growing faster than fintech itself.

Feeney described the emotional impact:

“Fraud feels like a personal failure. Companies can either repair that moment — or deepen the wound.”

In my case, they deepened the wound.

A false alarm phishing attempt resulted in:

• a frozen account

• zero communication

• zero reassurance

• me abandoning the neobank altogether

That wasn’t a fraud loss.

That was a trust loss.

CR believes fraud workflows should include:

• toggle controls to pause new transactions

• protections that still allow recurring payments

• real timelines

• human-centered communication

Imagine if, instead of a panic spiral and two-hour hold, I had been able to tap a button labeled:

“Pause new activity — keep bills running — I’ll call support.”

It seems small.

But that’s the difference between a crash test failure and a survivable bump.

Fintech Needs Crash Tests Because Money Is a Safety Issue

This is the core argument the industry has been avoiding:

Fintech products are safety-critical. They determine whether people can eat, pay rent, or avoid financial collapse.

Cars can kill bodies.

Fintech can kill stability.

Both deserve testing.

CR is the first organization to say it out loud:

If fintech is going to be infrastructure, it must be crash-tested like infrastructure.

Just listen to Hand:

“Consumers now have tools to evaluate institutions themselves. The bar is rising. Companies must rise with it.”

Or Feeney:

“Any product we evaluate today could be different tomorrow. That’s why we need roadmaps, not reactions.”

Or Mathias:

“It’s not whether companies want to be fair — it’s how. This gives them a blueprint.”

We don’t accept untested bridges.

We don’t accept untested medical devices.

We don’t accept untested cars.

Why have we accepted untested financial systems?

Fintech Is at a Crossroads 

The intersection where fintech now stands looks like this:

• AI accelerating product velocity

• Fraud outpacing prevention

• Trust in institutions at decade lows

• Regulators preparing for a new wave of scrutiny

• Consumers are increasingly financially fragile

But it also includes:

• an opportunity to rebuild the financial system

• new expectations around fairness

• founders building with purpose

• frameworks that didn’t exist until now

Fairness is no longer a branding exercise.

It is the infrastructure of future financial innovation.

The question fintech must ask in 2026 is not “how fast can we build?”

It is: “Will people trust what we’ve built?”

If the answer isn’t clear, the Playbook shows exactly where to start.

You can explore CR’s Fairness by Design Playbook here. 

And you can listen to my full conversation with Delicia, Johnny, and Evan on the Humans of Fintech podcast here. 

Because fintech doesn’t just move money.

It moves people.

And if we want those people to move forward — not backwards, not into harm — then this industry must finally do what every other safety-critical industry does:

Crash-test before we scale.

Fairness isn’t slowing fintech down.

Fairness is what will allow fintech to last.

Consumer Reports just told us exactly where to start.

I WANT IT, I GOT IT

• 🎧 Today’s Watch: I’ll be honest — I haven’t had much time to dive into a new Netflix show lately (that Warner Bros. acquisition is wild, but a story for another day). I am slowly chipping away at the final season of Stranger Things. I wasn’t sure they could pull it off, but one episode in and it’s giving me the same goosebumps it always has.

• 📚 Today’s Read: December In Washington Flanked By A Flurry Of Crypto Policy Forums by Cleve Mesidor, Executive Director of Blockchain Foundation in Washington D.C. and also founder of the Nat’l Policy Network WOC Blockchain. Cleve served in the Obama Administration and as a senior staffer in Congress, and has been a great friend and mentor to Fintech Is Femme. Following Cleve’s event, I’m reminded of our role in continuing to push for blockchain policies for justice.

• 🧘‍♀️Today’s Self-Care: Last week I was also on the road — this time in Chicago to spend some much-needed time with family. Always a self-care reset. We went skiing, which, if you know me, is hilarious because I hate the cold. I’m a beach-over-blizzard girl through and through. But somehow…I upgraded to the higher slopes, leaned into the risk and adrenaline, and didn’t wipe out once. Maybe — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — I actually like skiing?

_FINTUNES

🎶 Travis Scott - HIGHEST IN THE ROOM

Currently, what’s playing in my headphones. Hello throwback.

_{LET’S CONNECT}

📰 Share this newsletter with a friend and start growing your network.

🔗 Connect with me on LinkedIn for daily insights on female leadership.

📚 The holidays are coming, in charge of purchasing office gifts? Grab my book, Fintech Feminists! It looks nice on the coffee table 😉

That wraps up today’s edition—thanks as always for reading! Until next time, keep innovating and challenging the status quo. 

See you Thursday!

Love,

Nicole 💜