Looking to 2025

Welcome back to your desks everybody! We hope you had some time over the past couple of weeks to unwind with family and friends, and are now back and ready to tackle Q1.

The Footprint team is back and not even this frigid New York weather can dampen our excitement for 2025. We wanted to share our thoughts on the coming year with you all.

We have attempted to keep our rambling organized by breaking it into 3 sections: 1) predictions for the financial landscape, 2) updates coming out of Footprint, and finally 3) focus for our customers in 2025.

Predictions for 2025

IPO and M&A Markets reopen but not all sunshine and rainbows

2024 was an exit barren year. We expect that to change as Klarna and Chime seem ready to IPO. We also expect an increase in M&A activity with the new administration. However, we expect to see some “zombie” companies wind down or be sold for parts.

BaaS 2.0

Last year the CFPB started to crack down on some partner banks, with some particularly high profile cases. This will change the ecosystem as some banks opt to work directly with fintechs. However, we still see a need for BaaS platforms and believe the best will be able to adapt to the shifting environment.

Scams will continue to be a hot button topic

We saw an explosion of scams as AI tools became more accessible. Now 42% of scams are AI-generated. They are top of mind for major players with Monzo and NuBank both launching features last year to protect their customers. This will continue.

Footprint 2025 Updates

Suite of Account and Scam Protection Tools

Scams remain a persistent issue in the financial ecosystem, with bad actors often tricking customers into urgent, unauthorized transactions. Regulators are clamping down. At the end of last year, the CFPB sued BOA, WF, JPMC, and EWS over failure to protect customers from scams involving Zelle. In just seven years, its thought consumers have lost a staggering $870M due to these scams.

To help address this, Footprint is soon launching scam protection tools designed to safeguard users with customizable rules and enhanced authentication measures. These are easily deployable infrastructure interventions to build in safeguards at the moments people are most vulnerable to scams. We are thrilled to tell you more about this in the coming weeks, but in the meantime we are including a little sneak peak below. Additionally, we’re exploring features like “Scam Slowdown”, “Scam Bank Account Verification” and education pages to give our customers a more robust playbook against scams. These tools can help tenants create friction where needed, requiring additional steps or confirmations to prevent fraudulent activity.

We have designed tools to help tenants create friction where needed, requiring additional steps or confirmations to prevent fraudulent activity. For example, “know locations,” allow users to restrict sensitive action to only be accessible while at a known location.

Updated Playbooks

Playbooks have been at the heart of Footprint’s ability to orchestrate workflows and decision-making processes, but they come with limitations due to their static nature. This is why we’re excited to introduce Playbooks v2, the next evolution in dynamic workflow management.

Playbooks v2 expand on the original Playbooks by offering highly customizable, condition-driven actions that can adapt to your specific needs. Whether it’s streamlining KYB onboarding for different industries or ingesting internal data to decision on, Playbooks v2 enables you to do it all—directly within Footprint.

We want to enable advanced logic for companies (such as if someone is under 25 and can not be found in a bureau, go to IRS before asking for a DL or SSN card). Other tools which try to support this present it to their tenants in a complex manner of flow charts which you become responsible for reconciling (and building the corresponding frontend). This feature launch will allow our tenants to take advantage of the intuitive nature of Footprint, while layering on additional complexity, customizing the tool to fit their needs.

Here’s what makes Playbooks v2 powerful:

1. Rule Engine Improvements

   Playbooks v2 increase the conditions and situations you can dynamically respond to in your onboarding workflow. They also drastically simplify the process of writing rules and conditions with static analysis.

2. Connect Footprint to Your Data

   Verifications are now more flexible. You can seamlessly integrate your internal data at any stage of the onboarding process to enhance decision-making.

3. No-Code UI Workflow Builder

   With an intuitive, no-code interface, creating and managing workflows is easier than ever for customers of all technical levels.

4. Progressive Playbooks

   Users can pause workflows and resume them without losing progress, enabling seamless experiences tailored to individual needs.

5. Dynamic Data Collection

   Collect additional information on the fly, based on user behavior or contextual requirements.

6. Full Audit Log of Workflow Traces

   Maintain a comprehensive record of every step taken during the workflow for transparency and compliance.

Playbooks v2 represent a major step forward in workflow customization and efficiency, empowering you to build smarter, more adaptable processes.

Embedded Dashboards

We have been lucky enough to support many B2B2C companies in our first couple of years. Many of these companies have shared a desire to securely share parts of the Footprint dashboard with their customers. A good example of this would be Tenant Screening platforms that support property managers who would like to see the risk signals we flagged while verifying a perspective tenant.

With our new embedded dashboard feature, our customers can embed pieces of the Footprint dashboard (via iFrame) directly into their product. They have full control over what they would like to display, how they would like to organize this data, and who gets to see it.

Additional Data Providers

We are constantly adding new vendors to the Footprint ecosystem to ensure we offer our customers the best available technology. We are currently integrating a couple of exciting ones and cannot wait to share more.

Fun Things

We are always having fun over a Footprint! Here are some of the smaller features we are launching that we are very excited about

1. AI Assisted Manual Review

2. AI Assisted Customer Support

3. Reporting

4. Vertical Specific Portable and Verified Identities

Top Focus For Customers

Series A Fintech

“Top focus this quarter is continuing to improve our CAC numbers while keeping barriers of entry high enough to satisfy our partner bank. Lots of craziness in the partner bank world last year, and it feels like many of them are applying more pressure on their fintechs.”

Online Marketplace

“With more and more AI tools popping up we have seen an increase in suspicious selling behavior from select users. Our focus is how do we differentiate through trust in the marketplace?”

Community Bank

“We need to continue to build complex workflows and onboarding flows to convert users quickly and securely. Before Footprint, this took a considerable amount of time from our ops team and external engineering partners. Today, we can implement new rules, test them and push them to production quickly.”

Later Stage Consumer Fintech

“As a lending platform, credit risk is a top focus for us always. Credit and identity are pretty intertwined. We are focused on using identity signals to further aid our decisioning model. We are very excited for the enhancements of playbooks, where we can create nodes within Footprint to decision with our internal data and route users down different risk adjusted onboarding flows.”