EXCLUSIVE— With the help of APIs and other technologies, U.S. banks are mastering the use and sharing of data, but the next challenge is going to be even more technical.

To move forward, financial institutions are going to have to take a closer look at the user experience, Eric Hazard, CEO for fintech venture capital firm Vested Ventures, told Bank Innovation.

“How they take [their] innovations and put the UX, UI design behind it, that’s where the next innovations will come in,” Hazard said.

Vested Ventures, launched just this year, has invested $250,000 in fintech startups. Thus far, its investments include Spare, an app that automatically rounds up a user’s spare change to send to charities (and not to be confused with the ATM-killing app of the same name), and Remesh, a startup that uses AI and machine learning to share better customer insights with financial institutions.

The obvious first lane for this UX challenge, according to Hazard, is mobile: banks and financial customers are consistently moving towards a more digital, mobile environment, according to Hazard, which means the design and user experience of such apps is becoming even more critical.

Banks need to focus on eliminating user friction, like slow authentication or logins on a mobile app, or forcing users to leave the app to complete an action. Luckily, as Hazard noted, banks have examples to work from—they just need to look outside of the banks and towards China.

“The best example of this is WeChat; WeChat is that platform [for users],” Hazard said. “You go on the app to order a car, a meal, you use it shop, to talk with friends, pay for things—who is going to be able to copy that in a market like the U.S.?”

Smashing the “card culture,” or the attachment U.S. users have to their physical debit and credit cards, is going to take careful planning and careful use of data. For that, said Hazard, U.S. banks should rely on the technology that has brought them this far: APIs.

“In 2009, there were 89 APIs for finance, 15 in payments,” Hazard said, citing data from API directory ProgrammableWeb. “Now, there are over 500 APIs in finance, and over 300 in payments. Without APIs, you wouldn’t have the rise of cloud computing, machine learning, access to all of [this] banking data.”