Citizens Financial Group is pleased to participate as a founding partner of MassChallenge FinTech. Our partnership is a step forward in our ongoing effort to find innovative ways to help our customers reach their potential and a testament to our continuing commitment to engaging and supporting the start up community. In this post we’re going to talk about two challenges that each present an opportunity for FinTechs to partner with one of the largest banks in the United States.
As part of this initiative, Citizens has identified two challenges; one from our Consumer bank and one from our Commercial bank. Each challenge is an opportunity to help us innovate to solve a pressing customer need. The startups selected to work with us will engage with our teams and leaders to build innovative solutions that can have a real impact. These challenges also allow us to build a close relationship with the company and hopefully, build a fast track to production grade implementation.
We have two challenges for startups:
Consumer Challenge – Financial Health: Today, 57% of consumers in the US have difficulty managing their financial health. As banks bring a widening array of digital banking features to market, these consumers and small businesses are looking to get smarter about their medium-term financial goals, such as reduced debt, or improved credit, in a way that is intuitive and conducive to their day-to-day life.
Citizens is seeking innovative solutions and applications to proactively address this challenge for our customers including students & recent graduates, as well as small business owners. How does your company address this challenge?
Commercial Challenge – Advice and Insights: Recent research shows about two in three financial executives expect one of the top benefits of a core banking relationship will be value-added advice and insights. Increasingly, financial executives are challenging banks to find ways to deliver this advice and insight.
Through their day-to-day operations, commercial banks possess a wealth of transactional, financial and industry information on mid-market corporations. Citizens is working with MassChallenge to identify partners to design and build innovative solutions that will derive valuable insights from these data sets for our commercial clients. In doing so, we seek to exceed traditional expectations for a core bank and become their trusted advisor.
How will we help startups grow their businesses?
As we develop our technical capabilities, our teams have been actively engaged with startups to accelerate our development. Our strong level of engagement has allowed us to implement new and innovative technologies and has led to outstanding engagements with startups including SigFig and Foundation. Our teams are objective and dedicated to being good partners and as good partners, we provide outstanding opportunities and capabilities to the startups we work with. For our MassChallenge FinTech partners, we’ll provide, among other support:
- Discovery and working sessions with Executive Management & Product Specialists
- Mentoring sessions with UI/UX Specialists and Technical Architects (Technical Services)
- Focus Groups and Testing teams for capability optimization
- Access to Innovation Lab Resources and Cloud-based Sandboxes
We are excited to be part of this innovative enterprise from MassChallenge and hope you are able to join us to help our customers reach their potential.
Chris Musto, Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy
Want to partner with Citizens Financial Group during the 2019 MassChallenge FinTech program?
Apply at https://accelerate.masschallenge.org by October 12, 2018 at 12:00PM (noon) ET.
Browse the list below to learn more about the challenges issued by MassChallenge FinTech partners for the 2019 program.