3 Questions for Seth Ross, who leads our Product & Strategy practice
What does it mean to have an “operator’s perspective”?
It means I’ve sat on both sides of the table. I started my career as a strategy consultant at Oliver Wyman, then ran fintech businesses at Green Dot, Dayforce and MoneyGram. Owning a number teaches you things a strategy deck can’t. You have to take a hard look at your roadmap and decide what doesn’t make the cut. You have to get out in the field and talk to customers, both when you’re trying to win their business and when something breaks. And you have to work within your company’s internal dynamics, where the theoretically perfect answer can get in the way of the right answer for the business right now. I try to bring both views to clients: a strategist’s rigor and an operator’s sense of what can actually get done.
What is exciting about embedded finance?
I’ve been an advocate for embedded finance for years, and I believe we’re still only scratching the surface. Most people don’t intrinsically want financial services. They want outcomes. Nobody thinks, “I want to take out a car loan.” They think, “I want that new car.” No small business owner says, “I want a merchant cash advance.” They say, “I need to make payroll this week.” Embedded finance puts these outcomes in flow of people’s lives.
I’ve seen firsthand how much this can matter to people. I saw it at Dayforce, when we let workers get paid on demand. I saw it at MoneyGram, where making payments easier improved lives for millions of people around the world.
We’re still early in building financial experiences that fit naturally into people’s daily lives. That’s why I love working with fintech builders and innovative banks who look at the building blocks of financial services and find new ways to put them together, making life a little smoother, simpler and more rewarding.
What separates the winners in financial services from everyone else?
Banks and fintechs are converging, and that raises the bar for everyone. Banks can no longer just play defense. They have to play to win, the way fintechs always have. And fintechs, especially those becoming banks, have to learn to play defense too: managing risk, meeting regulators’ expectations and building for the long haul. The winners will do both.
The regulatory environment is relatively benign right now, and both banks and fintechs see plenty of opportunity: new partnerships, new products, new markets. The harder question is which opportunities to pursue. The right answer depends on what fits your goals, capabilities and values, not on what everyone else is doing.
Getting there takes real work: building a strategy and getting the organization aligned behind it. Sometimes the most valuable thing we do is create the right forum for executives and board members to hash out different views and land on an answer they all own. I’m a big believer in constructive conflict. Disagreements you surface in the boardroom are far cheaper than the ones you discover after launch.
