NBT #10: Data, Not Just a Great Character on Star Trek

Plus, how Venmo emoji autocomplete was born.

One of the best things I think any fintech company (or really any company) can do early on is invest in a robust data pipeline and great data visualization tools for all team members. And with all of the amazing data tools that currently exist, there really is no excuse for leaders to not invest in this area of the business.

Back in the early 2010s, Venmo had a phenomenal data scientist, Delano McFarlane, who basically built Looker before tools like Looker existed. Venmo was also a big champion of startups like Looker and Mixpanel, signing up for their services as one of their earliest customers and providing product feedback.

Why Invest in Data from Day 1

1. Shared, visible data will motivate your team to be efficient and effective

At Venmo, we created a strong culture where everyone was data-obsessed. As a marketer, I didn’t know anything about SQL until Iqram, the co-founder, sat me down and taught me how to use SQL to pull data that I needed. Once I learned how to do this, I became fascinated with seeing the impact of my work in the numbers. This was super motivating!

When people can see their impact in a quantitative manner, they are very likely to be more motivated.

According to McKinsey, data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times more likely to retain them, and 19 times more likely to be profitable.

2. Setting up robust data infrastructure will allow you to scale without being hampered by technical debt

“We do manage all of our data! We have google spreadsheets and we track everything weekly!”

While this manual approach may work for the first year or two of your company’s existence, it will not cut it when you experience exponential growth and start onboarding hundreds or thousands of users per day.

Not only will you have less time to manage your data, but you’ll also have a higher volume of data and more data points that need to be interconnected in order for you to understand how the business is performing.

By investing early in a robust data pipeline, you can ensure that every new data source—whether it’s transaction data, customer information, or compliance data—is seamlessly integrated into your system. This will allow you to always focus on growth rather than scrambling to retrofit systems.

Case in Point: Stripe, one of the world’s leading fintech companies, prioritized building a flexible, scalable data infrastructure early on. As a result, they’ve been able to rapidly scale across markets, products, and regions without facing severe operational bottlenecks.

3. Detailed data will allow you to unlock customer insights and create delightfully personalized experiences

Even in our earliest days, every Venmo employee could tell you:

1. What types of users we had

2. What types of transactions people were making

3. Which cities our users were concentrated in

4. What emojis people were using in their payment notes

5. The average number of friends our users transacted with on a regular basis

This was before tools like Looker existed.

However, I feel that very few fintechs I meet with have this level of granular understanding of their users and I’m always surprised by it given the plethora of data tools that now exists compared to what we had available to us in 2013.

While data can be used to drive important business decisions, it can also be used to come up with creative customer-facing campaigns. For example, since we had data on who was using which emojis in their Venmo payment notes, we had a leaderboard that we sent via email to top users to show them who was leading in pizza emoji payments or vacation related emoji payments. It was a really fun way to increase engagement, and show our users that we appreciated all the creative ways they were using Venmo.

4. Compliance, of course

Last but certainly not least, strong data infrastructure isn’t just efficiency and creating delightful customer experiences — it’s about not getting your ass kicked by regulators.

Regulators increasingly require stringent data protection measures, and a strong data pipeline can help protect your company from compliance violations, reputational damage, and costly legal battles.

Some studies show that the cost of non-compliance is 2.71x higher than the cost of maintaining robust data.

Fun story

I spent over 3 months managing a project to help appease OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control). We had too many payment notes between users that looked like the following:

“Saki bombs! 🍶💣”

Unfortunately, that’s NOT how you spell SAKE (the Japanese drink) and Saki is apparently a small terrorist group. That word paired with the word “bomb” was never going to end well, so we had to find a way to avoid triggering OFAC alerts every time a bunch of college students went out to drink.

The solution? I wish I remembered who at Venmo came up with this brilliant idea, but we decided to create a new feature (emoji autocomplete), as a result of these OFAC issues.

Now, whenever you type in a popular phrase in Venmo, you’ll notice that it’ll suggest replacing your written note with a string of emojis instead.

For example, when you type in “rent,” you’ll see that we suggest the following emojis: 🏠💸

And that’s the story of how compliance led to a really fun new feature on Venmo. :)

Anyway, invest in data! From day 1! It’s never too late. Do it. Do it now.