A Final Farewell

Cardholders, family, and friends:

You may have noticed that we’ve switched our application process to be invite-only - while we know that may disappoint some of your friends who were thinking about applying, we promise it’s for a good reason. After being live for almost a year and a half (wow!), we felt like we’ve learned quite a bit about how we could improve our application processes, both externally and internally. To make as clean as possible of a transition between the old and the new, we’ve decided to temporarily pause applications. We can’t wait for you to see what we’re working on - stay tuned!

We know what you’re thinking: another day, another data breach…

Final, the fintech company bringing transparency, control and security to credit cards, announces today Apple Pay availability for its cardholders. Through Apple Pay’s easy and secure payments on the web or in-person, Final is helping digital-age consumers take back control of their credit cards. In addition, Final is introducing advanced controls for its merchant-locked virtual cards, allowing cardholders to set custom monthly or lifetime spend limits for merchants like Netflix, Amazon and Lyft, furthering their level of control over card spend.

Fraudulent transactions made online or via phone increased 40 percent over the last year, making today’s consumer exceptionally more vulnerable to security breaches and hacks. Grey charges plague customers, when they forget about subscriptions or have services raise recurring prices without notice. Final’s proprietary technology reduces the hassles and headaches that come with a compromised account and grey charges. At its core, Final was created to make credit card users’ lives easier and provide a fundamentally better card experience than is offered today – shouldn’t your credit card company aim to do that?

I’m the kind of person who’s very hands on with personal finance: I budget and track spending carefully on Mint, review credit card statements every month to avoid grey charges, and periodically monitor my credit score on various free apps. Since I graduated college, I thought I had been doing my due diligence and taking all necessary precautions to both save money and spot fraudulent transactions. However, little did I know that I was missing one crucial component: reviewing my official credit reports.

Sometimes, team bonding looks a little different at a FinTech company. Recently, we came across WalletHub’s great WalletLiteracy quiz and thought it might be fun to take it and compare our scores. Here’s what we found:

Data security and privacy are becoming common discussion topics in our country. In the wake of hacking scandals related to the last election, Big Bank data leaks, and numerous other breach events, people are realizing that these concepts affect them every day in real ways. Given all of that, we thought it appropriate to share our stance.

We love to travel at Final - heck, it’s even a part of our origin story! However, we are still start-up employees on a budget, so we’ve found some great resources online to save money while seeing more of the world.

If you’re looking to save some money quickly, checking your bank statements for grey charges is the way to go. Read on to learn more about how to stop and prevent grey charges!

We at Final have decided to put out a Request for Credit Cards (RFCC), to help bring new ideas and products to market. One might think our Final branded credit card would be competitive, but besides building a product our customers love, what we’ve really built is modern credit card issuing platform that we’re looking to scale alongside partners. Think AWS for Credit Cards.

No one ever truly knows what to expect from their first job out of college. Going to school for Hospitality Management, all of my jobs up until now have been hospitality based. But as anyone in the Hospitality industry knows; plans change.

The average American has 2-3 credit cards in their wallet (source). We know that soon, one is going to be a Final card - but how do you pick the others? We compiled some great resources on picking a new credit card that we wanted to share with you:

Do you know what to do if a breach happens to you? If not, check out this infographic!

Here's 3 ways they have already proven they cannot be trusted.

It should come as no surprise that here at Final, we prefer to get our communications via email - that includes any information from credit card or insurance companies. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we still often check our mailboxes to find them stuffed with junk.

The time between handing your card over to a merchant and your transaction being completed is fairly minimal - but a lot goes on behind the scenes! Take a look at this infographic to learn about all of the steps (and institutions!) involved in making your transaction work.

A few of us at Final had the privilege of meeting with Mayor Libby Schaaf earlier this week, and we couldn’t help but share our joy with you.

At Final we spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a new credit card issuer in this day and age.

Thinking about working for a FinTech startup, but not sure what to expect? Here are three things you might not know:

OAKLAND, Calif. - June 20, 2017 - Final (https://getfinal.com), the Oakland-based credit card technology company has publicly launched its first product. Final aims to directly challenge the largest card issuers in the country - according to its CEO Aaron Frank, the company is building an “American Express for the digital era.”

About a year ago, Final announced that our “waitlist-only” beta was live.

This was a momentous occasion for us as a company, and for our earliest adopters. Since then, thousands have signed up, learned how incredible a credit card can be and helped us vastly improve our offering.

Today, we’re proud to announce that we are opening applications to the public and reducing the annual fee on our incredible product - based on cardholder feedback - from $49 to… $0!!!

The security of our customers is a big focus here at Final and that focus drives everything from our password policy to how we manage customer data and how we harden our servers. In addition to picking a good password, one of the best things customers can do to protect accounts from unauthorized access is enable Two Factor Authentication (2FA). While we have always offered SMS-based 2FA as an option, we recently added Time-based One Time Pad (TOTP) 2FA and recommend our customers transition to it, if possible. In this article I will explain what 2FA is and why it’s important, how SMS-based and TOTP-based 2FA work, and why we are recommending everyone transition to TOTP.

A few months ago we wrote at a macro level about the number of decisions needed to launch a credit card program and the steps required to release a single feature.

Starting a business is easier than ever. Template incorporation and investment docs, business planning advice, website builders, cloud storage, and other resources have become more widely available and cheaper in recent years (e.g.: Stripe Atlas).

I sat down recently with a renowned journalist who wanted to learn more about credit card transaction processing. We discussed the steps involved in every card payment, the parties who facilitate transactions and a 30,000-foot view of the economics involved.

Every day, consumers are bombarded with ads touting the importance of knowing their FICO score. Many of these include links to websites where they can view their “official” FICO score.

The card payments ecosystem is massive and shows no signs of slowing down as local and global markets become ever more connected.

Every company, no matter the size, has a unique process for feature design and development - they could follow a traditional waterfall or scrum methodology, or they could create their own process to suit their needs. Social apps and other consumer startups are often able to push new code to production at the end of a 2-week sprint cycle or even daily, but as a company in a heavily-regulated financial space, we’ve had to add some steps to our process that make sure we’re compliant and scalable.

For more than 50 years, the credit card industry in the United States has consistently done what consumers expect it to - and in many cases, this has been disappointing. When we started Final, we realized we wanted to do things differently. Not everything, but lots of things - motivated by our desire to do better by consumers.

We’ve been hard at work laying out our 2017 roadmap here at Final, and I wanted to take some time to give all of you a sneak preview of some of the things we have planned!

In case you were wondering, building a credit card company is a difficult endeavor - it’s probably the most complicated mass market product in one of the most heavily regulated industries - but it has been a rewarding journey. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Tl;dr — because it’s a community of smart people you can genuinely engage with.