Ms. Caroline Hughes is the co-founder and CEO of Lifetise, an award-winning consumer fintech company. She’s building the world’s first fintech metaverse, Lifetise to help you plan how to afford significant life events like buying a home or having children.

Do you struggle with planning your finances? Or, do you know what your future life looks like but can't seem to achieve it? Well, we have already become quite familiar with the things that can change our financial lives such as retirement, insurance and healthcare etc. But still there are many things we don't know about what will happen in the future.

Here, Lifetise comes to the picture. Lifetise is the world's first Web 3 consumer finance platform where people can plan their life goals within the Metaverse and can achieve them in real life. The idea of starting Lifetise comes from the thought about how people will spend their time. So, humankind seems to be moving into this hybrid system both physical and virtual.

Considering all the different activities we will be doing across physical and virtual worlds; we have got everything from virtually working to digital entertainment, whether that's attending a virtual event with people across the globe, spending time virtually with your favorite celebrities. We will be traveling across the Metaverse, visiting the Taj Mahal and many new digital wonders of the world. We have opportunities around real-estate and we have given a lot of talks recently about the opportunities of buying real estate in the Metaverse. We kind of put all of these together, we realized that we are going to need the ability for people to understand that financial life in this new hybrid exitance and the ability to pay for both the physical and virtual product and services and to make payments between the two seamlessly and that's kind of a where Lifetise comes in.

We started on web2, very much in traditional finance, helping people with precisely the immense life you describe. We talk about helping people with every life decision, from leaving school to the time you retire, effectively as a game of life. You show us what you want to achieve, and we show you how to finance that, and yeah, in the traditional world, taking out mortgages, loans, and credit cards, and all of that still exists, but of course, now, we have this parallel financial system. We have decentralized finance, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies, and what we need is the ability to translate all this incredible new stuff to mass-market consumers.

But how will we pay for the things in the Metaverse? Is there any ecosystem for this, or through coins? When we think about Metaverse and cryptocurrency, it's a bit clunky. You need that ability to pay for things in Metaverse and you are going to need that ability to move from fiat currency to digital currency and back again very easily. What we have seen is there has been a lot of infrastructure built so we kind of have the global payment gateways that exist. They are not subject to same gate keepers that we have, whether you are tied to a particular country you live in or you need to have a particular credit score to be able to access things.

So, from a consumer perspective it's much more accessible, spontaneous and transparent which is all great but from user experience as things stand right now it's not great. Because everything that has been built has done a kind of infrastructure level up and it has the right way to do it. We need to have rollers; we need to have pipes so the transactions could be made but now the second wave I am astonished to see better apps and better user experiences being built.

Mass-market consumer already has a great technical knowledge, but they are still not able to access all of these things in a very easy way because right now you need to connect to wallet to buy the NFT, to go and see your favorite cricket team play in Metaverse that blocks a lot of people from being able to actually do the thing. What we are seeing now is a lot of great companies and a lot of great projects that are really working to solve that how do we make a blockchain in the Metaverse accessible to the next billion people across the globe.

Lifetise was a fintech company, but we always had metaverse ambition. We always talked about having a virtual life simulator where you can create a life you want and perform and then show you how to finance it in real life. Hence, it is about taking the mix of what we can use digitally and virtually to help you play out different life scenarios, figure out what works for you then translate that back into the real world actually to achieve the goals in real life. So, it's not just marketing, it's not just pure entertainment, but this thing helps people improve their real life.

“Lifetise is a fintech metaverse - it's a life simulator. We are creating the most existing and helpful consumer finance in the world, to make it easy for consumers to access the right savings, investments, borrowing products, and protocols to get the things consumers want in life, and this is how it works”.

Everyone's going to be financing their lives with the mix of those traditional financial products that we all know and decentralized finance, including cryptocurrency tokens and NFTs so that you might pay for a self with a credit card, or equally, you might pay for yourself in the Metaverse using a digital currency. You may have the avatar that you buy in the Metaverse via Open Sea. You may choose to pay for that in fiat money or in your digital currency. So, it's about helping people understand how they can pay for physical and digital with fiat and digital currency.

In the financial service, we have the biggest opportunity where DeFi exists, because we do have this parallel financial system that has a reason, it's just kind of hit the early maturity. There are over 100 million blockchain wallets if we think about it. But as we said, there are primary early adopters. So, the massive opportunity is to bring the massive market into web3 and then connect to that daily life. So, what is it trying to do in their real life, and how do we make that easy for them?

When we look at our audience, our audience is in their 20s - 30s prominently, and that's 2.3 billion people globally. They are also now the biggest consumers of worldwide demographic and they will be 17 trillion dollars within the next two decades. So, all of a sudden, we got these group of people who are pretty digital natives, also now the most extensive customer segment for financial services, e-commerce, and entertainment, and that's why we need to build out this ecosystem because that's how we bring the mass market on to the blockchain and unlock all of these revenue opportunities.

This is all we did at Lifetise because we know so much about modeling every aspect of your life. We know what you are trying to achieve, we know what you can afford, and so able to make this intelligent product recommendation that might be traditional products that you like to have into Web3 into the Metaverse, we provide bridge and make that happen. For digital products which is a learn provider in DeFi and never to go which is laid on blockchain were able to help them attract those mass-market consumers that they want. So, we believe that the potential is vast, and the process is about how we make it make sense to the average consumer.

Disclaimer: This article is based on a conversation between Mr. Abhinav Jain – co-founder of Almond Solutions and Ms. Caroline Hughes – co-founder and CEO of Lifetise in METAMORPHOSIS, by Meta-Monks.

Copyright: Meta-Monks