Why Final Is a Design First Credit Card

Lets get this straight: there is no minimum viable product in financial technology. You get it right the first time and build from there. The bank that we partner with and the consumers that we market to won’t accept anything less than what we originally promised them - full security and control.

While American Express leads in customer service amongst credit cards (see: Why American Express Is Raising The Bar On Customer Service) and CapitalOne optimizes credit cards by employing an Information Based Strategy, Final believes that there is still a fundamental opportunity for users to have control over their credit card spending.

Our founding story evolves around the Target breach that personally affected access to a number of our credit card accounts. In the early stages of speaking with our friends, family and other consumers just like us, we realized that, aside from security, there is a very strong sentiment that the majority of consumers do not feel “in control” of their credit card spending due to the lack of transparency within the credit experience, from application to monthly statements.

Because we’re a new company, we can build something without the baggage of a sixty-year-old company behind it. Starting with the needs of real people, the frustration and the fact that a large portion of people view credit cards as a necessary evil to build a credit history, our goal at Final is to build a credit card that resonates with a generation that grew up with the internet and expects more from their banking experience.

Final is a design first (build second) company.

At our core, we’re designing a credit card experience that all of our users have had a hand in creating. While we have some pretty strong ideas about what would be interesting in a new credit card, we recognize that we can’t build a great product in a bubble.

Instead of only thinking about what cool features we should build, we believe that designing a truly great company/product/experience, requires investing time in speaking with users like you. We’ve received an outpour of feedback on everything from the aesthetics of what makes a credit card look good to how we should build our app – and all of this feedback is directly affecting the product we’re designing.

I believe design and community go hand in hand. We’ve talked to hundreds of you, and have reached thousands more of you through surveys, but we’ve only just begun. We want to hear from you, and continue to design a better product together.

Feel free to contact me directly at: davis@getfinal.com.

— Davis Godbout
Co-founder & VP of Product