Episode 253: Intelligent Friction in Digital Banking with Tony Brancato
Tony Brancato, Chief Product Officer at Charlie Financial, joins Melissa Perri on the Product Thinking Podcast to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in developing financial products for older Americans. With a focus on security and user-friendliness, Tony shares how Charlie Financial is reimagining banking for the senior demographic, often overlooked by tech innovations.
The conversation reveals insights into building trust with users, the role of intelligent friction in product design, and the importance of understanding user needs in product development.
Want to know how to create impactful financial products that cater to the senior market? Listen to the full episode with Tony Brancato to discover how empathy, security, and strategic product decisions are shaping the future of digital banking for older adults.
You’ll hear us talk about:
07:15 - Understanding Different User Needs Across Ages
Tony explains the distinct differences between 62-year-olds and 75-year-olds when it comes to digital banking needs and preferences, highlighting how product features must be tailored accordingly to meet diverse expectations.
12:59 - Designing Intelligent Friction to Prevent Fraud
Discover how Charlie Financial's Fraud Shield introduces strategic friction to secure transactions and empower users to prevent fraud, offering peace of mind and control over their financial activities.
23:12 - Measuring Success Beyond App Usage
Tony discusses how Charlie Financial measures success not just by app engagement, but by the financial health and security of its customers, emphasizing the educational aspect of their services to help users recognize and prevent scams.
Episode resources:
Charlie Financial: https://www.charlie.com/
Tony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonybrancato/
Other Resources:
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Episode Transcript:
PTP253 - Tony Brancato.txt
[00:00:00] Tony Brancato: So the financial services industry for the last 30 years has been eliminating friction wherever they can, and they sell that, it's like getting down from moving your money in days to moving in hours to minutes to seconds, go, go, go, go. And while that might make for a better user experience, it's simultaneously making it much easier for fraudsters to run away with the money and much harder for it to claw it back. And so our perspective on this is that, we think friction isn't just a helpful part of the experience. It's actually an essential part of the experience, and that really, like intelligent friction is what we really designed fraud shield around.
With whatever product that you're building, you need to have empathy for the users of that product. If it's a product that you would use yourself, great, use the product, use it relentlessly. If it's a product that's that's outside of what you would normally use, it's just building those relationships with your customers and keeping that tight feedback loop. Anytime I did that as a young pm, I always built better products, but sometimes you just get trapped in the bubble of I know what to do, I know what the problem is, I know what the solution is, and you march forward on the solution. And just keeping that tight relationship is super important.
[00:01:13] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:01:51] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today I'm excited to welcome Tony Brancato, the Chief Product Officer at Charlie Financial, and a lecturer at UCLA. With over 20 years of experience in product management, Tony is re-imagining banking for older Americans, a critical, yet often overlooked segment. His work is particularly interesting for our audience because it challenges assumptions about tech fluency and usability in FinTech products for seniors. I'm thrilled to dive into Tony's innovative approach designing secure, accessible and user-friendly financial products. Welcome Tony.
[00:02:26] Tony Brancato: Thanks, Melissa. Thanks for having me.
[00:02:28] Melissa Perri: I am really excited to dive into this topic. As we were talking about before I hit play I have older parents that I'm always trying to navigate tech challenges with, so I have been like diving into Charlie Financial. I think it's really cool. Can you tell us a little bit about how did you end up there?
What's your product management journey? What made you wanna go to Charlie?
[00:02:48] Tony Brancato: Sure. Yeah. Happy to. My initial intention was actually to be a sleep researcher. That's what I studied at Brown. And I, when the first web boom hit, that just seemed like way more fun. So I decided to disappoint my parents and go on this journey that was. I think a little bit less certain what the outcome was going to be.
But my entrepreneurial journey really started at a company I co-founded called Everyday Health. Our mission at that time was to be the antidote to WebMD, where WebMD is a place where you have a headache and you go visit it, and then you're convinced you have cancer on the other side. So like how do we build an experience that's easy to understand for condition management and weight loss and that experience?
We, we helped Americans lose tens of thousands of pounds and get meaningfully healthier. So I think that was my first experience at having an impact. And oh, we can build things that actually have a positive impact on people's lives. That was super exciting. I then pivoted into media. I was approached by Patch to help build out a hyperlocal journalism product.
Saving local news, and that was just another really exciting mission to go on. I went from there to Time Inc, to help save magazine magazines and then wound up at the New York Times where I was overseeing product for NewYorkTimes.com. Growing up to New York Times was in my driveway every morning, my dad, I remember him sitting in his chair reading it. So it was a real dream to be able to be a part of that institution. And again, mission impact, helping the stories get to the right readers at the right time was really exciting for me. Life drew me to the West coast. I jumped into big Tech, was working at Amazon for a bit, overseeing IMDB, the entrepreneurial bug just kept whispering in my ear. And so that's what brought me to Charlie. I was just really excited about this mission and this audience, and being able to tackle a really meaningful, impactful problem.
[00:04:37] Melissa Perri: I think so many of our listeners have probably been in the position, and as you said before, who are still lucky to have our parents around of trying to help our seniors with digital products, right? Digitally native things. Charlie Financial is focused very much on this senior demographic, 62 plus.
Can you tell us a little bit about the unique challenges that this demographic faces when dealing with digital products in today's tech?
[00:05:02] Tony Brancato: Absolutely. So just to set the stage, there are 10,000 people a day retiring in the United States. 10,000 people a day, and the average retiree is living paycheck to paycheck off of Social security, which is about $1,800 a month. And then the average retiree is just under attack, frankly, from fraudsters.
It's just a constant ding on their phones, email, social media. They're just, they're getting hit from all sides. And so the responsibility, I think the unique challenge for us is that's a huge responsibility, we're overseeing their financial oxygen and making sure that they can. Their money will move when they need it.
And then locking that money down, when they don't need it, is is the central challenge. I also think there's actually interesting opportunities here. One of the first things we did, we know grandparents like to put grandkids on their, in their wallets. They like to brag about their grandparents.
We put the, we let you put your grandkid, this is my daughter. But we let people put their grandkids, their dogs their cats on their Charlie card. We realized that this demographic, the senior citizen discounts is a huge opportunity. They're they're all over the place and no one has actually ever documented all of senior citizen discounts in one place.
So we, we did it, we built the most comprehensive senior citizen discount database, I think, on earth. And it's called Charlie Saver. It saves our customers hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, and that's not necessarily a conventional thing for a bank to build, but when you are zeroed in on a demographic like this, that kind of opportunity emerges and it was just an opportunity for us to build trust and really service the demographic in a unique way.
[00:06:48] Melissa Perri: That's really cool. There's so many things there I think that are typically overlooked for them that you're thinking about, which is amazing. When you are out there trying to craft a product, right? That is geared towards like, you know, it says 75 year old users, right, compared to a 35 year old user.
[00:07:06] Tony Brancato: Yeah.
[00:07:06] Melissa Perri: What are the types of things that you are taking into account, functionality wise, user experience wise, that really make a difference for that older subset?
[00:07:15] Tony Brancato: Sure. It's a great question. One thing that's interesting just to start is for me is that we learned early on that a 62-year-old is actually very different than a 75-year-old and much closer to a digital native than you would expect. I'll give you an example of a product that resonated differently with those different ages.
So we built something called fraud alerts copilot, where we send out suspicious activity alerts, it's a standard banking practice. We let you add a trusted loved one to your fraud alerts. And that could be your it, it could be your kid, it could be your spouse, et cetera. And we're really excited about this future. It's peace of mind. A second set of eyes on your account. 75 year olds love this feature. 62 year olds totally ignore it. They do not want their kids up in their business. They are totally in command of their finances. And so the idea that you would have to let someone in that is just not where they're at in their lives.
But generally speaking, I would say most banks, they basically put a bucket of a thousand Lego pieces in front of you and they leave it to you to sort through it. When we really studied our customers, our prospective customers, we realized they really only need 10 Lego pieces. So let's just pick those out of the bucket, design them beautifully, make them modular, make them easy to understand, and put them front and center, and then relentlessly track adoption and feedback of those features.
And so you wind up with just a very focused experience.
[00:08:47] Melissa Perri: How did you think about where to place your bet on those, 10 core features or what did you do user research wise to say Hey, this is where we're gonna start, this is what people need.
[00:08:56] Tony Brancato: So critical to this was not only, your standard pipelines of customer research, I think my mom was the first customer of Charlie, and so I think all of us committed to building personal anchor points of empathy and accountability. And we all take the mission very personally, but bring understanding how users bank today, or product prospective customers bank today. One feature, i'll give you an example that, that we did a lot of research on. We assumed video chat was going to be an essential feature because we're a digital bank, we're, we don't have these physical branches. The relationship between the teller and the customer is essential for us to recreate somehow and put, so we thought video chat front and center.
Our customers wanted nothing to do with video chat. They don't wanna see the person on the other end. They don't wanna have to like, put their face on or dress up like for a video chat. So they're like, no thank you. No, thank you. Another early feature that we assumed was going to be meaningful was, was home equity. We know our customers, a lot of their life value that they've accumulated is in, is trapped in their homes. As we interviewed people, more and more fraud just kept emerging as this storyline. And so almost every person that we spoke with had lost between hundreds and thousands of dollars to fraud at some point.
And very few of them told anybody about it because it was just the shame, the embarrassment. They felt like they were alone. They were scared that if they told their kids about it, now their kids are all up in their business. And how do we create an experience that's respectful and relatable and empathetic to where they are?
And that's how we got to fraud Shield being a centerpiece of the product. It was really just talking and learning how to speak to these customers in a way where they would open up, because that shame is such a big blocker, such a big psychological impediment for them.
[00:10:52] Melissa Perri: Yeah. How did you go, I guess that's a really great topic there, right? Like around that shame a lot of people were not willing to share that with strangers. Like how did you go about getting people comfortable, actually saying, Hey, this is, this was a big issue, or I had this happen to me.
[00:11:07] Tony Brancato: Yeah. Yeah. I think every one of our PMs and our designers have worked really hard to get really good at phone calls and zoom calls and in-person interviews. And I think the most important thing out of the gate is to make people feel like they're not alone. my mom was scammed, and that's like one of the first stories I take out of the gate.
We talk about what's happening with our customers today, and you can just see people let their guard down a little bit when they know that they don't have to feel shame. And then on the other side of it, if you can give people the sense that it's actually they're doing a service to their fellow 62 plus community members by letting us know what's happening out there and what's happening to them.
And I think that. That feeling of, oh, I can be part of the solution to this problem. I think is what helps people open up.
[00:12:00] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's really nice. Almost like community building.
[00:12:02] Tony Brancato: Yeah,
[00:12:03] Melissa Perri: You're gonna, you're gonna make it better for somebody else there too.
[00:12:05] Tony Brancato: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:12:07] Melissa Perri: I love that. And the fraud is so crazy and I, it's not slowing down with AI. I had a friend who told me about his mother got also scammed, and somebody had called her on the phone and it was his son's, not even him, but like his son, her grandchild's, exact voice saying, grandma, like I'm stuck. I'm in the hospital. Like I need money. And she ended up sending like $5,000 or something to this person. And it wasn't even like her son, it was like her grandson. And he is like, how did they get my son's voice?
[00:12:38] Tony Brancato: Yeah.
[00:12:39] Melissa Perri: And that's so scary.
[00:12:41] Tony Brancato: Scary.
[00:12:41] Melissa Perri: Yeah, the whole, and I, I, it's just, it just keeps going and going. So what are with Fraud Shield, I know that's like a super core part, I've been looking at your website about it too.
[00:12:52] Tony Brancato: Yeah,
[00:12:53] Melissa Perri: tell me about like, how did you develop it?
What does it do? How does it help
[00:12:57] Tony Brancato: sure.
[00:12:57] Melissa Perri: people from being taken advantage out there?
[00:12:59] Tony Brancato: Sure. I, the, those stories I really feel every one of these stories that I hear and we hear them from our customers all the time, and that's certainly has been part of what's informed the development of Fraud shield.
So the financial services industry for the last 30 years has been eliminating friction wherever they can, and they sell that, it's like getting down from moving your money in days to moving in hours to minutes to seconds, go, go, go, go. And while that might make for a better user experience, it's simultaneously making it much easier for fraudsters to run away with the money and much harder for it to claw it back. And so our perspective on this is that, we think friction isn't just a helpful part of the experience. It's actually an essential part of the experience, and that really, like intelligent friction is what we really designed fraud shield around. So I'll give you a couple of examples. We have this thing called sleep mode. Sleep mode is you put your card to sleep a little like sleepy.
Eyes go down and the card won't let any transactions through except for recurring transactions and you can schedule it. So like my mom is not out clubbing on a Friday night, to my knowledge. So she sets her card to sleep and she just has total peace of mind that she knows that she's not gonna get hacked while she's sleeping.
We have a large constituency of customers that actually leave their card on sleep mode all the time, and then when they're at the cash register at the grocery store, they just wake their card up, swipe. And then put it to sleep again and again, the card is just locked down and that's strategic friction.
The customer has to participate in it a little bit, but that also makes them feel like they're in control. We had a feature that started as block online transactions. We just have customers that don't shop online. But then we realized we have a bunch of customers that only shop at Amazon or Walmart, and so we introduced a toggle that says Block online transactions except for Amazon and Walmart, and hugely popular because it now you just know I can safely shop online where I normally shop, and we're just gonna filter everything else out.
Probably the biggest swing on the intelligent friction front. We introduced and it was inspired exactly by what you're talking about, Melissa, the grandparent scam. We started hearing it over and over and it's really smart people that this is happening to, and they just, the fraudsters have gotten so good at injecting panic and urgency into the conversation.
And so what speed bump does is every time you add a new payee to your account or your account is accessed from a new device, we slow down the interaction. We pause money movement for six hours, and then we, we introduce in situ education are you sure you knew that person? Did you try reaching them a different way?
Was there an unusual sense of urgency? And just that breathing room for people, we, and then we give them an undo button, stop the money from moving. And that's been a huge success. It was a little bit controversial at first. People expect their money to move quickly, but when they came to understand that this is now like this ultimate layer of security, that in the unfortunate event of them getting defrauded.
They can stop it. They're like, they have the power to stop the money. Often our customers actually call us so we can stop the money movement together. And so that's been really gratifying to see that this intelligent friction concept has really been effective at protecting our customers.
[00:16:28] Melissa Perri: I love that there's there's so many features you're talking about that happen in the app and online, but you also have mentioned several times about, they'll call us and they'll ask us to do things. How do you marry that phone experience or that personal experience with the digital experience, especially for this age group?
[00:16:43] Tony Brancato: Yeah that's a great question. And we've we knew early on that this was a customer segment that was just going to want to talk on the phone. And we embraced that. So I think we think of the support pillar. We keep your money safe. We make your money go further. And it's experience that's respectful and relatable.
And that third pillar is all about support and communication. So we're just frankly relentless about training our agents reviewing our call scripts, reviewing the actual calls when they go well, our CSAT scores are something that we literally review every day. And it both informs the product backlog as well as informs future classes for training. 'cause it is a stressful job on the support front when you have an upset 70-year-old woman who might have just gotten scammed. So we also think a lot about how to like, keep morale up for our support team to make sure that they feel like they've got the support they need from us to do their jobs on the frontline.
[00:17:46] Melissa Perri: Yeah. What are ways that support and product management work together? Because it sounds like you guys have to be very lock step with what you're doing to support this segment and the way that you're so tightly integrated.
[00:17:58] Tony Brancato: Yeah, absolutely. So as part of my responsibility, I actually have the call center,
[00:18:02] Melissa Perri: Oh, cool.
[00:18:02] Tony Brancato: Reporting up to me as well as the product group. You don't always solve it through or an org chart, but this is, it's something that frankly just improves my level of accountability and ability to make sure that our head of the call center is communicating effectively with our VP of product, and that those feedback loop cycles are really tight.
The, I think the other thing is that our product managers and our designers are just listening to calls all the time. And we're in full story and we're watching what's happening and both at the individual level, which I think is what keeps us grounded. That these are real people, everyone, every dollar that's lost is a dollar that person needed, as well as trying to strategize how to draw meaningful, aggregate information out of all of the data from hundreds or thousands of calls.
[00:18:55] Melissa Perri: And when you are doing that, I think some of the pushback that I hear from product managers right, is I don't have time to go listen to the calls or talk to my customers, do that. How do you as a leader, like create that space and how do you encourage them to actually go out there and listen?
[00:19:10] Tony Brancato: Sure. I totally hear that challenge, and as you, you well know as I do that PMs have too many things to do at any given minute, an hour of the day, we just block off time and that you know it, even if it's just 30 minutes a week. Where we can review what's going on. I think just baking it into our rituals is really important.
And we also make sure that feedback loop is coming to the engineers, so that the engineers have like full context for what's happening to our customers. So it just winds up becoming an organic part of the conversation where you'll just be in a standup and the engineers will be like, how did our customers what is the feedback that's coming in?
If something goes out? Like we're talking about the feedback all the time. And and that just helps keep all of us accountable.
[00:19:57] Melissa Perri: Yeah, I really like that. I think more people need to block off time for user research
[00:20:02] Tony Brancato: and just go
[00:20:02] Melissa Perri: do it too.
[00:20:03] Tony Brancato: It's hard. That's hard.
[00:20:04] Melissa Perri: Don't move it.
[00:20:05] Tony Brancato: We've gotta do it. We've gotta do it.
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[00:20:50] Melissa Perri: When you're thinking about the accessibility of your product as well, we talked about, you can pick up the phone and call, but then there are these features on it where you can put the card to sleep. All these different things that you're interacting with apps with, we know. A lot of the older population is not super tech savvy. Like how do you think about designing the right experiences? What are the processes that you go through to make sure that things are accessible and they will know how to use it, and they don't feel intimidated by the tech that you have.
[00:21:17] Tony Brancato: I think at, at its root, it certainly starts with design. We have an amazing design living in a space of being at risk and they've gotten scammed. So she feels that mission as well.
Obviously usability testing is critical for us, but I think kinda back to that earlier notion of zeroing in on the 10 Lego pieces, it does give you some degree of flexibility in terms of designing the interface of, here's your dashboard. There aren't that many things that you frankly have to deal with at any given time, and that does give us some flexibility there.
But our customers also, I, and I was a little bit shocked by this. Everything can happen through text. Our customers actually don't have to log into the app and most of the functionality that you need, they actually can manage through the direct like pipeline of texting back and forth between us and them.
And so that's also been I think. Some customers aren't gonna log into the app more than once a month to just check their balance or to see that their direct deposit has come in. And so we have that daily touchpoint with them. I mentioned, text Me All transactions. That creates the daily dialogue between us and our customers that the vast majority of our customers are very comfortable texting.
And so for us, that's been the real bridge I think between the functionality in the app and what's actually happening to them in their day-today, lives.
[00:22:46] Melissa Perri: That's really cool. I love that. It is just simplifying it and being like, you know how to do this, this thing which is texting and we're just gonna meet you there. You don't have to actually log into the app.
[00:22:54] Tony Brancato: Totally.
[00:22:55] Melissa Perri: It's interesting because it's so antithesis to what typically people would be looking at, right? Which is like app usage. Daily active users on it, that type of stuff. So how are you measuring success and how do you think about the different, the different ways we would do that from traditional
[00:23:12] Tony Brancato: sure.
[00:23:12] Melissa Perri: product management areas there.
[00:23:13] Tony Brancato: There's some foundational things about banking that we just have to get right. Are the right transactions going through and are we successfully blocking the wrong transactions? And if a nefarious transaction has come through, what's happened as your account or your card been compromised?
The that is that's top tier. We have to just make sure that we're getting that right. And. So bar one is just measuring that and keeping and keeping the ratio of good transactions to bad where it needs to be. I think our CSAT scores, our app store reviews, our Trustpilot ratings are things we take very seriously.
Our customers are not afraid to voice when they're not, when they've had a bad experience. When one of our customer service reps has let them down or the product has let them down we don't always get it right. We're really rigorous about when that bad review has come in, we reach out to that customer, we talk it through we try to sort it out with them and that builds a positive feedback loop. I think a, across the board. It's a, it's really a balance between, core app usage, but really ultimately the financial health of the customer. Is this customer be able to transact successfully and frankly, are they able to successfully recognize when they are getting scammed?
I think that educational part is really important for us, and so we're often sending quizzes to our customers like, are you and, and newsletters, Are you aware of the latest financial scams? Here's what to do if you think you've been scammed. Over the holidays we released a product called Family Fraud Shield, which was which was for people like us at our age, how to navigate financial conversations with your parents or elderly relatives.
And we thought we got a really good response to that because it's a really difficult conversation to navigate for anybody. And so we measure ourselves effectively by making sure that our customers are as empowered as we are to know what's happening with their accounts, and that they're able to protect themselves.
[00:25:17] Melissa Perri: That's interesting too. Thinking about people who are younger with the aging parents, are you finding, that a lot of them are suggesting Charlie Financial to their older parents or they discovering Charlie on their own?
[00:25:27] Tony Brancato: We're very grateful that we've got positive feedback loops on both front. We have a really good referral program where our customers are able to generate a referral bonus if they tell customers, a friend of mine was, we were launching Charlie I described what the value proposition was to him and he said, if my mom told me about your bank, I would tell her it was a scam.
It sounded too good to be true. And I was like, oh no. And then he said, but if you convinced me that you were trustworthy, I would make my mom sign up for your bank. And so it's always been in the picture for us that we have to reach. Our generation as part of our overall customer growth strategy.
It is a little bit challenging sometimes to figure out where to reach them. But family fraud shield was really, I think the first big expression of that is that this is the touchpoint, is you have to be talking to your mom and dad or aunt and uncle about what's happening out there. 'cause they've probably been scammed and they're probably nervous to talk to you about it.
[00:26:27] Melissa Perri: Yeah. That's such a, like an important problem to, to solve right there, and it brings everybody together now, stakeholder wise.
[00:26:33] Tony Brancato: And if we can earn trust by being part of that conversation, we think that becomes an organic way for customers to potentially consider moving their money over to Charlie.
[00:26:42] Melissa Perri: Oh, for sure. When you think about building products for this age group, it's been wildly overlooked. Like I, I was telling you a little bit before, but like I have most disdain you could possibly have for the way that Apple handles. Like it's limiting your iPhone for elderly people. Like my dad is 83 and he hates the iPhone, I got him, I got it so I could track his location, which I've had to hide on him 'cause he keeps turning it off on me.
[00:27:08] Tony Brancato: Ooh.
[00:27:09] Melissa Perri: And there's no way, and there's no way for me to just be like, don't allow him to do that. So I even had to do the parental controls to go in there and control his iPhone with it.
So he couldn't turn it off on me, but I also had to do it in a sneaky way 'cause he doesn't wanna be like super tracked at first.
[00:27:25] Tony Brancato: Yeah.
[00:27:25] Melissa Perri: he realized it was useful, 'cause he'd get lost, I could be like, oh hey, like turn left over here. He started to warm up to it, but he would turn it off on me for forever
[00:27:32] Tony Brancato: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:27:34] Melissa Perri: like out somewhere. We wouldn't know where he is and I'm like, this is not good. And doesn't answer his phone all the time. Apple like isn't thinking about these things. It's like they think about it when with, I feel like they have a lot of parental controls for children, but they're not thinking about the elderly
[00:27:47] Tony Brancato: Right,
[00:27:48] Melissa Perri: So I gave him this iPhone and he hates it. He had this super old Samsung that was way too slow. I tried to turn on the limited functionality one so that he could just get what he wants. Like he wants to take
[00:28:00] Tony Brancato: right.
[00:28:01] Melissa Perri: he wants to look at his videos, he wants to go into his photos. He wants to text people and then he wants a couple apps that he goes into. He is got three or four apps that he goes into all the time. He doesn't want anything else and he wants some big, so he can actually see it.
[00:28:12] Tony Brancato: Sure.
[00:28:13] Melissa Perri: I turn this on and like his favorite thing is going through photos on his phone. Like he takes photos of photos on his phone and then he wants to zoom in and show people it. There's no zoom functionality on that mode. You can't zoom into photos,
[00:28:25] Tony Brancato: Oh, you can't turn. Oh, that's.
[00:28:27] Melissa Perri: I'm like, that's what every elderly person wants to do is show you their photos and be like, oh, let me zoom in on it and he knows how to zoom. it's you can't do that. And I had to turn the whole thing off
[00:28:37] Tony Brancato: Oh, that's mad.
[00:28:38] Melissa Perri: His number one thing that he wants to do. And I'm like, how did they not go out and check this out and do that research? And actually understand that this is what people wanna do and like when you limit functionality, you gotta like keep the stuff they actually
[00:28:52] Tony Brancato: Right,
[00:28:52] Melissa Perri: want.
[00:28:53] Tony Brancato: right, right. Exactly.
[00:28:55] Melissa Perri: You can't also text photos on it either. Like you couldn't send photos to people. It was just plain text.
[00:29:01] Tony Brancato: I greatly empathize with that story. My mom was also 83, and so it is it's definitely a balance. So I think, we try to, we wanna make sure we think I, there are a lot of financial institutions and just general people targeting this demographic that I think talk down to them and them as less capable and don't treat them as like meaningful stakeholders in this process.
And I would say for us, it's just been, for me personally, it's been eye-opening again, like how incredibly, technically sophisticated some of these retirees are. They've got crypto wallets, they've got, you know, they're, they're, they're, uh, in many cases just on the bleeding edge. We also have customers who have government issued Android phones don't have internet at their house.
And, everything is happening through the phone, but it's a phone that might be five or six years old. We have to design a product that actually scales and works and accommodates across all of those use cases, which is challenging, but be, the motivation is always there because the mission is so clear, like both of those constituents are under attack.
And that, that mission and that feeling of the urgency, I think, animates us to want to do the best we possibly can to solve those problems.
[00:30:18] Melissa Perri: What surprised you when you started digging into this demographic? More about the way that, 62 plus year olds actually act and interact with technology, and when you're building all of this?
[00:30:29] Tony Brancato: Yeah. Yeah. I think the thing that. I would say the most pleasant surprise, the big hypothesis is this generation ready to let go of physical bank branches and pleased to report that has turned out to be the case. And we've been really successful in acquiring those customers. Some of those customers are coming to us from Chime, so there have already been, like part of the digital banking experience potentially for years.
And so we were really, we were pleasantly surprised to see that. I think, the, maybe like a less pleasant surprise is how active this audience is on social media and how trusting they are in across the board. Almost everything they see on social media. And so that is part of the education process for us is to try to combat when they see there's no such thing as a free iPad. It's just, it's not.
[00:31:27] Melissa Perri: click on it.
[00:31:28] Tony Brancato: Don't click on it. Don't put your card information on there. It's pro, it's probably not, you're probably not dating Elon Musk on Facebook. But like we have customers that believe truly in their hearts, that they are in love with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or or Jason Momoa or Sandra Bullock, through their phone. And so you can't just say that's dumb. Like you can't disrespect that emotion. You just have to carefully tread because even though you wanna respect that, like the genuine emotion of it, you also have to say, Hey, and start to ring the alarm bells of it's probably not Elon Musk that you're dating on Facebook dating. And even if it was,
[00:32:12] Melissa Perri: And don't send him money, he don't needs yours.
[00:32:12] Tony Brancato: He doesn't need your money. He doesn't need money. And that's a real, that's a meaningful tension point between us and our customers that we've worked really hard to try to calibrate on.
[00:32:23] Melissa Perri: That's really interesting. Why do you think they're so trusting? I'm just like comparing it to, generation of 30 and 40 old who I think don't trust anything they see on the internet.
[00:32:31] Tony Brancato: I know. I, it's a great, it's a eternal question I think I, for us, I think it's the, the whole premise of social media is you trust things more when they're coming from your friends. I think Facebook and other platforms have just done a really good job, frankly, of kind of subverting that trust of, oh, this came from your, I'm now used to all the trustworthy things that are coming from my friends. And so now anything else that comes through the pipeline and you know, are these fraudsters are targeting like, oh, I flagged that I like Jason Momoa's last movie. And so now you target oh, find me anyone that's a fan of Jason Momoa
[00:33:08] Melissa Perri: Oh.
[00:33:09] Tony Brancato: I'm gonna go now I have the entryway. The grandparent scam that you mentioned, the fraudsters can pick up just enough information off of public social media feeds often to make a credible version of the grandson, in Mexico, even if the voice isn't the same, it's just a panicked voice. And I think it's been unfortunately, so many years that people have been conditioned to trust what's on their phones and to trust their friends that these other things coming in over the top now inherent, that same, that level of trust that you should only give to your friends.
[00:33:44] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's really interesting and I guess that makes sense too 'cause it's like Facebook was a place where all our friends are, so it's like we go that platform to hear what our friends are saying and now they're just sprinkling it in with a bunch of junk as well.
[00:33:55] Tony Brancato: And Melissa, if you compound that with the loneliness epidemic, a lot of people just want to have friends, and so that I think has been a much more effective tool for stickiness on those apps. Is is just. They just wanna talk to someone,
[00:34:11] Melissa Perri: Yeah. Yeah. They're just one community there.
[00:34:14] Tony Brancato: right?
[00:34:15] Melissa Perri: When you think about how fraud is ramping up in the future of it, what are you looking out for in, where do you think it's going to go?
[00:34:22] Tony Brancato: I think it's getting more sophisticated by the day. I think the, you mentioned the voice scams. You only need three seconds of voice sampling now to be able to mimic a trusted, loved one or companion. It's a war that we're in right now. We are very careful about how we are thinking about introducing AI into our interfaces.
We are using AI in the backend to more intelligently detect fraud before it happens or while it's happening, and to shut it down. But I think it's our job to just stay one step ahead of the fraudsters. And again, I think that ties back to our earlier part of the conversation of maintaining that dialogue with our customers about what's happening on the ground and having our moms and dads also, reporting oh, like forwarding, like this crazy scam that just happened. Like we have inbound, we've built up a pretty steady stream of information about what is the cutting edge today of what's happening with these scams. And we've now turned that into a feedback loop with our newsletters and our customer interfaces and our support team to keep our customers as in like as informed as we can so that they don't fall prey to these things.
[00:35:36] Melissa Perri: That's really interesting. Tony, I got two more questions for you.
[00:35:39] Tony Brancato: Sure.
[00:35:40] Melissa Perri: Closing this out. back, what advice would you give to yourself when you were first starting out in product management?
[00:35:46] Tony Brancato: Oh that's a good question. I think I tell the earlier version of myself to just find a pathway to empathy as quickly as possible with whatever product that you're building, you need to have empathy for the users of that product. If it's a product that you would use yourself, great, use the product, use it relentlessly. If it's a product that's that's outside of what you would normally use, and I'm not 62, so I couldn't be that person for in this particular case, it's just building those relationships with your customers and keeping that tight feedback loop. Anytime I did that as a young pm, I always built better products, but sometimes you just get trapped in the bubble of I know what to do, I know what the problem is, I know what the solution is, and you march forward on the solution. And just keeping that tight relationship is super important.
[00:36:36] Melissa Perri: I love that and I think everybody deserve needs. A little more empathy in the product management world too.
[00:36:40] Tony Brancato: for sure.
[00:36:41] Melissa Perri: And then is there a particular book or resource you would recommend to product managers or leaders?
[00:36:46] Tony Brancato: Sure. Absolutely. Two of my favorite authors, Marty Cagan the book inspired was inspiring to me and I've taken many of his classes. I've known him for many years and is just a crucial mentor for me. Highly recommend his videos and books. And then Christian Crumlish, also a mentor for me for many years. And a friend and his books about UX are amazing. So I think like calibrating product management in UX, I think is just one of those really crucial touch points. And he's just a, he's just brilliant. Those, if I could recommend two books inspired and then product management for UX people are two of my favorites.
[00:37:23] Melissa Perri: I love that, and I think those are two great books. So thank you so much for telling our audience about them.
[00:37:27] Tony Brancato: Sure, yeah.
[00:37:29] Melissa Perri: a pleasure to. Have you on the podcast, if people wanna learn more about your work and Charlie Financial, where can they go?
[00:37:34] Tony Brancato: Great. You can go to charlie.com to learn more about Charlie and if you have if you have relatives that you think would be interested, please go by all means. And then you can reach me on LinkedIn. Just look for Tony Brancato and you should be able to find me.
[00:37:48] Melissa Perri: Amazing, and we will put all of those links on our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back with another Dear Melissa episode where I answer all of your burning product management questions. So go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. And the next week we'll have another amazing guest. Make sure you like and subscribe to this podcast so that you never miss an episode. We'll see you next time.