Buliding a consumer finance digital ecosystem

Dee Choubey is co-founder and CEO of digital personal finance platform MoneyLion since 2012. He previously worked at Barclays, Citadel LLC and Goldman Sachs.

What does it take to truly disrupt a deeply entrenched industry like consumer finance? At MoneyLion, we recognized early on that the traditional financial landscape was highly fragmented—similar to retail before Amazon, technology before Apple, and travel before Expedia. 

These companies revolutionized their industries by creating integrated digital ecosystems that seamlessly connected consumers with providers, streamlining processes that were once disjointed and inefficient. MoneyLion is charting a similar path in the financial services sector, where the average American household makes dozens of financial decisions each year—often in a decentralized, one-off manner, leading to inefficiencies and mismatches between products.

By pioneering a consumer finance digital ecosystem, we are working to bring together consumers and financial product providers in a dynamically integrated ecosystem. This approach not only simplifies access to personalized financial products, but also ensures these products work harmoniously together, much like Shopify has done for e-commerce. By leveraging advanced technologies, we’re eliminating the friction typically associated with financial transactions and centralizing decision-making in a way that enhances both convenience and alignment with consumers’ financial goals.

Building this ecosystem wasn’t straightforward; it required a confluence of technological advancements and regulatory evolution—like proliferation of open-banking—to come to fruition. The development of robust API technology was foundational, enabling seamless integration across various financial services and allowing different institutions to communicate effectively within our platform. Additionally, the evolution of Know Your Customer (KYC) processes ensured that we could securely onboard and verify millions of users, all while maintaining compliance with increasingly stringent regulations. 

Advancements in machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and data management played a critical role as well. We’ve analyzed vast amounts of data to deliver personalized financial products tailored to each consumer’s unique needs at various stages of their financial journey. Examples of this include MoneyLion AI (available at moneylion.com/search), our take on “talk to your money” and ultimately culminating in a powerful personal financial management tool that incorporates transactions from a consumer’s own bank, credit-card, and brokerage accounts, as well as their real time credit score data. 

As we build a digital financial platform for our users, we recognize that the American digital financial landscape poses unique challenges. Unlike other economies in which a standardized national fintech "stack" for KYC and payments—such as India's UPI system or China’s integrated payment networks—creates uniformity, the U.S. market is marked by intense competition at every node of the supply chain. This lack of a common infrastructure has led to a fragmented experience for consumers, often resembling a “flea market” where they must repeatedly undergo KYC, underwriting, and validation steps across different platforms. This not only results in consumer frustration—where users might be pre-approved on one platform only to be rejected later—it also leads to a poor customer experience that tarnishes a financial institution's brand reputation and ability to retain their customers.

MoneyLion's approach to normalizing and streamlining this process is distinctive in our integration of advanced data architecture, APIs, and software development kits. These tools allow us to clean and map data, enabling institutions to pre-approve consumers with consistency, accuracy, and confidence. For instance, our new end-to-end checkout experience allows consumers to search for, find, and finalize financial products in a seamless flow. Our strategic investments in commerce and content also play a crucial role, through education from the ‘consideration’ to the ‘intent’ phase of financial decisions.

MoneyLion’s journey to becoming this digital finance ecosystem has been one of strategic evolution and bold decisions. A significant turning point came in 2021 when we took the company public as then a predominantly direct-to-consumer fintech. At that time, our focus was on rapid growth, driven by our vision of creating a connected platform where consumers, data, and financial institutions could seamlessly interact. We launched several consumer-focused initiatives, including our first party products and in-app content feed that enhanced user engagement and broadened our reach. We were wary of playing an expensive customer acquisition game, so we had to employ something different. We knew that to truly build an integrated ecosystem, we needed to expand our capabilities beyond just consumer finance.

This realization led to two critical strategies. First, we built capabilities for an embedded finance two-sided marketplace platform, which formed the backbone of our B2B enterprise strategy. This allowed us to extend our ecosystem capabilities to other financial institutions looking to use our decisioning platform. Second, we invested in the build-out of a digital media content studio, which accelerated our ability to educate and engage users. These acquisitions were not just about growth: they were centered around building the infrastructure necessary to support a robust and trustworthy digital finance ecosystem.

In 2022, amid rising interest rates and tightening capital markets, it became clear that our aggressive growth strategy needed to be recalibrated. While the public capital markets may not always appreciate the long-term value of building such an ecosystem, we were convinced that this approach was essential. We pivoted to focus on execution, optimizing our product offerings to drive cost efficiencies and accelerate our path to profitability.

Our efforts are bearing out in MoneyLion's financial performance. In Q2 2024, we grew revenue by 23% year-over-year to a record $131 million, and we now have 17 million total customers, up 73% year-over-year, and now with over 1,200 partners in our network. Our compounded revenue growth rate from 2020 to 2023 was 75%, and we now operate with healthy Adjusted EBITDA margins. We’ve weathered the industry's highs and lows—from the initial euphoria around fintech to the skepticism labeling it as an "unproven and unprofitable" sector. Yet, there’s a clear arc of evolution here, with MoneyLion standing as a testament to that journey. Today, we are consistently growing, with an average revenue growth rate of approximately 25% year-over-year each quarter from Q1 2023 to Q2 2024, expanding margins, and generating free cash flow. This affords us the flexibility to reinvest in growth at attractive margins. To take MoneyLion to the next level, we must continue earning the trust of both consumers and financial institutions, ensuring our ecosystem matches needs with products effectively.

We are better positioned today than ever to deliver superior outcomes for consumers and empower them to make the best financial decisions. For our investors, we’ve assembled a more durable and enduring business model that is diversified and has multiple ways to win. By playing offense with discipline and continuing to innovate with new initiatives both in-market and in development, we are poised for responsible, efficient growth in the long term. Despite the headwinds we’ve faced on our journey to building the first consumer finance digital ecosystem, we are excited about our ambitious vision: to become the number one destination for Americans to make financial decisions.