Urban FT Joins Financial Health Beta Project

Digital banking solutions provider Urban FT has joined the Center for Financial Services Innovation in an effort to help the finserv industry better gauge consumer financial health.

A June 29 announcement released in honor of CFSI’s first annual #FinHealthMatters Day said Urban FT will participate in the CFSI’s Financial Health Beta Project, an initiative that looks to explore quantitative factors that impact consumer financial health. The goal of the project, the CFSI said, is to provide financial services providers with a set of benchmarks so they can understand their customers’ financial state, and ultimately help those customers improve their financial health.

Participants like Urban FT track their own consumers’ financial health between June and December of this year; for Urban FT, that means gathering data from its own platform as well as conducting surveys with its customer base.

The CFSI will use this information to develop deeper insight into four key components of financial health: spend, plan, save, borrow, the firms explained. CFSI, which will also assess the data against the backdrop of its eight ways to measure financial health, will publish the results of the project as well as its conclusions next year.

“We joined the Beta Project so that we could play a part in the evolving technology landscape and discussion around consumer financial health,” explained Urban FT‘s EVP of Enterprise Growth Glen Fossella in a statement. “Urban FT provides financial services to clients that serve all demographics of end consumers. It is important for Urban FT as a company to understand how our users leverage the service for their financial benefit, and whether our technology can better be utilized to improve their financial health.”

The firm’s Chief Marketing Officer, Mark Kilpatrick, will take the lead on Urban FT’s participation in the program, reports said. Kilpatrick will be heading a team that he said will focus on taking the learnings from the initiative to develop and refine the company’s products.

Urban FT joins other financial services companies including Coastal Federal Credit Union, EverFi, Guaranty Bank, LendStreet, NetSpend and Sunrise Banks as beta partners in the financial health analysis initiative.