the early days of e-commerce in the 1990s. There was “such anxiety” around typing credit card information into a website, he says. Now it’s second nature for many people.
“I think in very short order, people are going to feel the same way about how they manage their finances in general,” says Palmer, whose company is a Cinch partner. “They’re going to have a hard time imagining what they were doing before they had a set of bots” working behind the scenes on their finances, he says.
Palmer’s company, based in Cambridge, MA, is going to be an early testing ground for that idea. Tamr employees will get access to Cinch’s product as part of their company benefits package, Palmer says. (Cinch is also a Tamr customer. Tamr has helped Cinch “clean up and organize” some of its data sets, Collins says.)
Cinch is learning which tasks users are comfortable with handing off to the software. Some say they’re fine with letting it automatically switch them to a cheaper auto insurance policy, for example, but they wouldn’t want the software applying for a mortgage on their behalf, Moriarty says. Some users may never want Cinch’s software to take any action without their oversight, Collins adds.
One of the keys to Cinch’s ambitions, especially around its autonomous financial agent, will be building trust with users. It will take time, and it might require Cinch reaching a large enough size to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the average consumer, says David Chang, a Boston-area tech entrepreneur and investor who is not involved with Cinch.
“Over the course of 10, 15 years of knowing the brand, you could see that shift,” says Chang, who has held leadership roles at PayPal, Goldman Sachs, and TripAdvisor. But “the number of third parties we’re going to trust our finances with is kind of limited.” Cinch, he adds, will need to “rise in terms of mind share” to join that trusted group.
Cinch is laying the groundwork for that trust by implementing strong security measures in its software, and it plans to share company policies with consumer watchdog groups, Collins says.
“It’s going to be on us to always keep the transparency and maintain the good principles we’ve built the company on,” Moriarty says. “There’s a lot of trust and credibility-building we’re trying to do now.”
[Top photo by prykhodov, courtesy of Depositphotos.com.]
