See Finicity and the rest of the FinDEVr New York speaker lineup on March 21 & 22. Register and save 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.

Interview with Nick Thomas, Finicity’s Co-Founder & EVP:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?
Before joining Finicity, I worked for organizations of all different sizes, including Komodo, Unicity, 3Com, US Robotics and Megahertz. Overall, I have more than 20 years of experience in technology design, development and marketing. More than 15 of those years have been focused on personal financial wellness and data aggregation. I’ve spoken internationally on topics such as fintech, finance, regulatory standards, crowdfunding and mobile payments, and my views on mobile technology, pervasive computing, APIs and credit/lending decisioning have been featured in major media outlets like American Banker.

As the co-founder of Finicity and executive vice president of our data services business, I oversee a passionate and energetic team dedicated to innovating in the financial services sector.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

At FinDEVr New York, we’ll be demonstrating our new Finicity Connect drop-in UI widget, which will enable developers of financial management, payment and lending apps to more rapidly stand up Finicity’s data insights and aggregation services. This is an exciting fintech solution because it further simplifies the experience of utilizing our rich aggregation platform. Our technology is a game-changer because it’s a great example of utilizing big data to transform industries and day-to-day living for individuals.

For example, utilizing our modern RESTful API, we can now incorporate transaction data into an existing business system, like loan origination. We’re digitizing the credit decisioning process, making it faster, simpler, more secure and more accurate — while also making it a better experience for lenders and consumers. It really will be transformational.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

One of our favorite implementations of our data insights and aggregation technology will be in the credit and lending space. By utilizing the real-time data we can access through aggregation, we’re able to generate asset and income verification reports. This is a key component of the loan origination process which, to date, has basically been a “pen and paper” process.

Now, we are enabling lenders to see validated information rapidly. For consumers, they won’t have to chase down all the information, and that’s just the beginning. With real-time data, we’ll actually be able to generate a financial health picture for those that may be well suited for a loan but don’t have the credit history a lender is looking for. This is just one example of an industry that we’re transforming with our solutions. There are others we’re already helping, and I’m sure we’ll see new ones pop up in the future.

FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.