Yours in Finance: Kiah Lau Haslett

The same questions asked of the people shaping the future of banking and fintech.

Welcome to Yours in Finance, where we are tracking how banking is changing. Once again.

Kiah Lau Haslett, creator of Fintech Takes Banking and host of the Bank Nerd Corner podcast, responds to our questionnaire: “I'm not willing to spend more than ten minutes teaching an AI or an automated thing to do it because it only takes me ten minutes.”

About Kiah

Kiah Lau Haslett is the creator of Fintech Takes Banking and hosts the Bank Nerd Corner podcast, where she nerds out about all things banking and financial services. Her special areas of focus include accounting, transactions, balance sheet management and how technology is changing financial institutions. She spent six years at Bank Director, first as managing editor and then as their banking & fintech editor overseeing the FinXTech platform, and was a financial institutions reporter at S&P Global Market Intelligence for eight years. Kiah has a bachelor’s in journalism from the University of Nebraska.

Q&A

The interview is edited for brevity and clarity.

What's difficult about managing money?

So, I am a proper millennial, which means that I did everything right in college and still managed to graduate with $40,000 in debt. One thing that I think is underappreciated in part because student loan debt is so pervasive, and also because there's some generational differences in graduating with that much debt that early in your life, is that it can contribute to some pretty nihilistic or negative financial behaviors.

I could answer this question personally with me and my 17 credit cards and trying to maximize all my credit card bonuses, and those are ways that I have made my money management personally difficult and challenging.

But I think one of the things now, having been out of college for 15 years, is to understand the way that debt shaped my future financial decisions. And then also, shape the kind of life that I think I will get to have. And then now, to be 15 years from that person and think in what ways do I still feel that kind of mentality, that you'll-never-get-out-of-debt mentality. And what ways do I need to evolve my mentality that I have paid off my student loan debt finally this year, and move forward while also understanding that meant like the no down payment or that meant a lot of credit debt accumulated alongside paying off debt.

So, I think that's an answer that speaks to what's difficult for people to manage money, which is not necessarily like, how do I move my money from left to right, from deposits to debits. I think it's, how do I think about money? And what attitudes do I acquire about money early in my life? The foundational imprinting attitudes. And then, what does that mean for my behavior going forward? And what does that mean when it's no longer true? How do I find a different way to think about money?

What do you like about digital banking?

I have complicated personal finances, and digital banking just makes it really easy for me to track the money and send stuff around. I love not having to go into branches.

I also like that digital banking has made it easier to shop in a lot of ways. There's the convenience of geography, but if you limit yourself to the institutions you can just see down your street, you might be ill-served in other regards, like products, rates, capabilities.

What financial habit or behavior are you unwilling to automate?

That's interesting because I use budgeting software and the budgeting software imports all my expenses if it's connected. But I spend like ten minutes a day reconciling those. So, just making sure that there's no double entries or that things got coded correctly or they're the category that I want them to be coded in. I don't want to say I'm unwilling to do it. Obviously, there's importation of the transactions itself. But it's really nice to have that human review, and also, sometimes there are things in the budget where you have to just be like, “wait, which card did that hit? Which account did it come out of?” And so you can't fully turn away from it.

And if I don't do this every single day, it actually will pile up on me and that's also the time of the day where I track my spending challenges on my many, many credit cards because I am trying to maximize every financial decision or every spend decision I have against the card that will help me with my challenges.

So it's a little bit more complex than something that I would be able to automate at this time. And also, I'm not willing to spend more than ten minutes teaching an AI or an automated thing to do it because it only takes me ten minutes. So, that's probably something that I'm going to have to do every day for the rest of my life until I die.

What's a financial decision you'd be happy to outsource to an AI agent?

Well, okay, so I just started using or experimenting with Navan Edge. It’s an agentic AI travel agent that can book your business travel.

You type in like, “hey, I need to go to Northern Virginia. So, I can fly into two different airports. I need to land on this day, and I will either be flying out one day later, two days later, or three days later.” And so, it was going to be a lot of research to do this. But at the same time, it does all the research and it gives me the quote and then can give you the different options to book. Then you just tell it and it books and there's a little form you can put your credit card in.

I was thinking why am I comfortable having an AI agent do this? And I think it's because it is the same experience except someone else did it for me, did all the research. And then I was thinking, well, it's because I put my credit card number into Expedia, like I'm already kind of desensitized I think to some of the areas where it just makes it feel like a lower risk financial decision.

The other thing too is, with travel, a lot of stuff is reimbursable or changeable for credit. So I felt like my downside was protected by the actual decision itself.

When I used Navan for the first time, I was thinking about it for 24 hours, about how easy it was to book my travel. I was kind of amazed, and I was like, “this is gonna save me a lot of time.” Because one thing about travel, work travel, is it's not travel that makes you excited. It’s not like, “oh, I can't wait to sit on this beach or whatever.” You're just like, “no, find the conference hotel, find the closest hotel. I want to fly in the afternoon. I want to fly direct.” These are preferences that you would make yourself if you were doing all the research, but you just tell the agent, and it was amazing. They aren’t paying me to say that but I was sold on it. Until I have a bad experience and then I will go back to doing it myself.

What earns the right to be someone's primary financial relationship?

I'm a credit card points maximalist, and a lot of people don't have that relationship with credit cards. They're not trying to get every single credit card so they can get every single travel they do for free the way I am.

But one thing I always say to them is that the combination of needing this points travel guru type person, plus me being a bank reporter, like the Venn diagram overlap is that I want people to feel like their travel products support their goals, align with their spending and make it easy for them to access these things.

The reason why I encourage people to shop around their travel credit card and explore this world is because travel credit cards, in my opinion, are one of the very few times a bank cares about the things that are important to you, rewards you for your business, and gives you a competitive product. They are actively competing for your business. Now, they don't make it easy to do some of the earns and some of the redemptions. I think that complexity sucks, and that's why people are discouraged from doing it.

But I think that fundamental driver of, “you have understood the things that are important to me. You have understood whatever my financial goals are and you will help me get there” matters.

I could answer this question with student loan debt, too. One reason why I am a SoFi customer is because SoFi, at eight years into paying my private student loan, was like, “hi, nice job paying that off. We will give you a loan that is half as high as your stupid refi interest rate, and we will extend the payment so it feels doable for you. And then, we will give you a bunch of other products and services that support who you are today, but also, if you want to buy a home, if you need to write a will or do estate planning, if you need to open retirement accounts, it’s there.” And then they have career coaching. And I thought that was like a nice product suite for the person that their customer likely is, like me.

How do you define a bank?

Well, Gerry Corrigan [in a 1982 essay] defined a bank.

Now, do I think most banks understand their business as enacting monetary policy, like day in and day out? No. I also think that one thing that he left out is payments because I think at the time, the payments that banks facilitated then were not as great as a bank facilitates today.

I will say that some of the novel charter applicants are increasingly making the answer for me that a bank is just a company that has a bank charter and is regulated by a bank regulator.

Those companies are changing what banks do. ... We're kind of messing with every single element that was in Gerry Corrigan’s definition.

What's the last thing you bought that you're still thinking about?

This is definitely a kind of an aspirational purchase. I have been thinking about the cultivation of taste. How does one acquire taste or acquire the experiences that inform taste? So, one of the things that I've been paying for is a wine club.

I was thinking about how when I go into the supermarket and just buy wine, I'm looking for a price point and then the coolest label, which does not seem how I should be selecting wine.

I like having opinions and I like having informed opinions. And so I felt like this wine club would help me develop a palate where I think about why do I like things and why don't I like things, and also expose me to varietals that are outside of the supermarket.

Also my friends and I are going to do a caviar and chicken nugget tasting on Monday. And I bought a really sick set of caviar from a sampler from Costco. It's a little kit and it comes with an insulated bag and four tins of caviar and like smoked sturgeon and blini and like a fancy tin of potato chips and crème fraîche all together. I love a little kit, and so I am very excited about toting it around and reusing the bag, and like, I'm going to have so much caviar. I'm gonna be eating caviar and chicken nuggets for the rest of the month.

Those two are class and taste and the development of those things and that fulfillment. It is important for me to experiment and have opinions and do these things.

Previous Yours in Finance

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