Many will be dealing with the financial and emotional impact of the festive season well into January and beyond. It takes an average of 4 months for people to get their finances into shape after Christmas.
As we step into the new year, financial goals are on British people’s mind, with one third (31%) resolving to get their finances in order in 2024 - reducing debt or spending and saving more.
The benefits of Open Finance are ready to be incorporated into businesses, the result of many product and industry developments. Open Finance continues the paradigm shift in financial services to give consumers the ability to leverage the power of their own data - helping businesses deliver game-changing products and services that are laser-focused on delivering more personalised experiences and better outcomes.
Open Finance is the next stage in the evolution of Open Banking. Open Banking mandated that individuals owned their own data and that banks had to give consumers the ability to share their data with authorised third parties.
Open Banking has been a game changer for financial inclusion and product innovation, with over 11% of the UK population benefitting from Open Banking solutions. The problem is that Open Banking only covers payment accounts (such as bank accounts, credit cards and e-money wallets). It does not include investments, pensions, properties, mortgages, loans, and the other data which make up the rest of people’s financial worlds - limiting the potential benefit to financial wellness and inclusion.
Open Finance extends Open Banking beyond payment accounts and allows consumers to get a truly holistic view of their finances.
Whilst Open Finance does not yet carry the same legislative obligation as its predecessor, Moneyhub is heavily involved in a number of industry initiatives to introduce various aspects of Open Finance. We will see the range of data available growing exponentially in the short-to-medium term.
How to get started with Open Finance
Just because there is no mandate doesn’t mean there is no data. Many firms have already gone beyond the Open Banking mandate to expose their data through APIs - meaning that innovators seeking to unlock the benefits of Open Finance can do so immediately.
We recently launched a new API Recipe called ‘Fact-finder’, which illustrates what is currently possible. It draws people’s financial data into one view, increasing firms’ internal efficiency and enabling them to deliver personalised experiences empowered by access to rich data sources.
Fact-finder goes beyond account connections, bringing the whole financial picture into one view and applying Moneyhub’s analysis and intelligence to deliver the highest possible level of service to the end user.
It also shows that firms can use Open Finance to deliver better customer outcomes at every stage of their interaction. Feel free to get in touch to learn more about it!
Why should I care about Open Finance?
The Financial Services landscape is ever-changing and evolving, as are the challenges faced by financial service providers and financial advisers.
The rising cost of financial advice is widening the “Advice Gap” - a troubling trend in which quality financial advice is only accessible to people with significant investable assets. This leaves people with fewer assets (but still significant sums of money) unable to access financial advice that would allow them to get the very best out of their money.
The FCA Consumer Duty regulations are further increasing the pressure on firms, mandating them to demonstrate fair value and positive outcomes for their clients while actively avoiding customer harm.
Seamless sharing of data is absolutely vital for solving both of these issues and driving new innovations, which will further help firms battle these challenges.
A number of cost-effective alternatives, such as robo-advisors or hybrid advice models, have recently come to the market, aiming to provide guidance where necessary, reduce the cost of advice and close the advice gap. This is great in theory, but in practice, a lot of the time, the responsibilities are just shifted onto the consumers’ shoulders, which can be daunting, time-consuming and prone to errors. As a result, we haven’t necessarily seen the adoption rates needed to really shift the dial.
The key to solving these issues is the seamless sharing of financial data, allowing consumers to connect, aggregate and share a holistic view of their finances. This will unlock the potential of robo-advice propositions and increase the efficiencies of traditional financial advisers.
Automated fact-finding onboarding could effectively triage consumers into the most appropriate area of advice or guidance for them based on their actual financial situation. Some people may just require hints, tips or guidance. Others may need some more specific financial advice that can be delivered through a robo-advice proposition. For some, speaking to a financial adviser is required, but the adviser will be armed with most of the information they need to provide comprehensive and personal financial advice.
Introducing Fact-finder…
Our Fact-finder API Recipe provides a holistic, in-depth snapshot of customers’ finances to enable the delivery of advice empowered by access to real-time data. It offers Open Banking and Open Finance connectivity, as well as house price lookup, pension connection, spending/ cashflow analysis, ISIN matching and nudges that encourage actions that improve financial wellness.
Firms that deploy Fact-finder can save on the cost of onboarding whilst reducing abandonment rates because they no longer have to do a key part of the work required to really get to know their customers’ unique financial situation.
Fact-finder is one of our range of API recipes that includes Smart Saver, which supports customers’ financial journey through personalised and automated saving, and Rent Recognition, which helps people improve their credit profile and access the financial advice they deserve.
What’s next for Open Finance?
Fact-finder is part of our mission to enable financial services firms to bring the benefits of Open Finance to their customers. We already connect our clients to thousands of institutions and give them the ability to gain holistic insights into consumers’ habits, needs, behaviours, and aspirations.
Moneyhub partnered with The Investing and Saving Alliance (TISA) to develop a set of API standards for Open Finance. TISA’s ambitious Open Savings, Investments and Pensions (OSIP) initiative used Moneyhub’s enhanced sandbox to enable pioneering fintechs and financial services providers to experiment with data-sharing. Sandbox tests are an important part of developing Open Finance standards for the sharing of savings, investment and pensions data, which have the same security, data minimisation and user experience delivered by Open Banking.
The OSIP initiative was a first step beyond Open Banking, going beyond the mandate to provide API standards allowing the safe, fast and secure data exchange.
As well as TISA’s OSIP, Moneyhub has been working closely with the Pensions Dashboard Project. We are on the Industry Steering Committee and were the leading alpha dashboard provider. We now offer a sandbox that allows pension providers to connect to our Replica Central Digital Architecture (RCDA) and associated Test Harness to define, run, and re-run automated end-to-end tests.
We are giving our clients access to a Pensions Dashboard solution, once again allowing them to get ahead whilst awaiting clarity from regulators and the government. Dashboards aggregate pension information in one place to improve engagement by giving people unprecedented visibility of their savings - no matter how many pots with different providers they’ve got.
Standard Life, part of Phoenix Group, the UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement business, partnered with Moneyhub to become the first UK provider to commit to offering a commercial pensions dashboard.
Users can discover and view all their pension data, as well as bank accounts, credit cards, savings, property valuations, ISAs, loans, mortgages, and other financial products. By gaining visibility of all this information on the same platform, customers can make long-term plans based on a deep, up-to-date and straightforward understanding of their finances.
Bring Open Finance to your customers
With Moneyhub, you can bring Open Finance to your customers today and support their financial journeys. Get in touch to talk with our team of experts.
There has been a lot of interest in Nudge Theory over the last few years - but what does it mean in practice, and more importantly, how can it help promote financial wellness, and bolster Consumer Duty compliance for your business?
In a nutshell, nudges are interventions, which can be both large or small, aimed at getting people to act in their own best interest. It could be as simple as a sign placed near the door in an office to remind employees that turning off the light when they leave will reduce electricity consumption, or supermarkets influencing people to eat healthier by putting fruit and nuts beside checkouts instead of confectionery.
That said, nudges are at their most effective when personalised, relevant and timely, and that the individual maintains freedom of choice and feels in full control of the decisions they make.
As described by Imperial College London, ‘Nudge Theory is based upon the idea that by shaping the environment, also known as the choice architecture, one can influence the likelihood that one option is chosen over another by individuals.’
The concept was introduced by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book: ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ in 2008 and was originally created to influence health indicators by inducing behavioural change (think 10,000 steps). Indeed, findings from an Imperial College London study estimated that health-related nudges were responsible for a 15.3% increase in healthier diet and nutritional choices.
When we speak about nudges in a financial context, we are usually referring to specific messaging displayed to customers throughout their journey of product application or a product life cycle, to promote a positive action.
However, where the magic happens is when nudges are combined with rich, real-time financial insight about an individual customer, along with on-brand messaging to truly reflect your unique brand tone of voice - meaning as a business, you can proactively communicate with each customer in a hyper-personalised way to significantly influence positive behavioural change.
But the really clever new magic is when Moneyhub link these messages together!
Moneyhub’s pioneering methodology of ‘chaining together’ nudges, encourages and then continues to respond to the natural progression of behavioural change, providing insight, support or useful education material at timely moments - a capability unique to Moneyhub. These ‘chains’, or journeys, mean that nudges are relevant and appropriate for each customer - relevant to their financial situation, their mindset, their relationship with their bank or provider, providing appropriate wording and encouragement at the right time - thus achieving ultra-high engagement and conversion.
Moneyhub creates these personalised nudges based on triggers from our market-leading, AI-powered decisioning engine. Data-powered nudges influence behavioural change even more effectively, by prompting timely, relevant actions when customers are most receptive. For example, a mortgage lender could simply nudge customers when their loan-to-value ratio passes a threshold. But imagine when the lender can proactively engage with a customer who isn’t quite eligible for a lower rate. Supporting them to make affordable over-payments so the customer at the end of the term now becomes eligible for the lower rate.
Data-driven insights made possible by Moneyhub’s AI-powered categorisation will ensure your business achieves higher engagement and conversion rates - in addition to being able to evidence Consumer Duty compliance.
The new Consumer Duty meant that one of our large enterprise clients needed to accelerate its strategy to improve customers' financial situations, and implement a messaging framework that could Detect, Intervene and Report on customer outcomes.
The client’s existing messaging platform already provided communication to customers through product silos, but the challenge was to create an overarching messaging framework to analyse customer data holistically and intervene with personalised, chained nudges when vulnerability or a bad outcome was detected.
Moneyhub implemented Detect and Interviene, Moneyhub’s always-on customer messaging approach, enabling timely, relevant and personalised nudges to encourage an alternative outcome based on customers' historic and current financial spending behaviours. Using holistic customer's data, mapped across the usage of all their financial products, our client is able to detect characteristics of vulnerability, and customers who are at risk of poor outcomes, going on to provide appropriate chained nudge interventions to continually recommend and encourage alternative actions for improved outcomes.
Another large enterprise client wanted to evaluate a specific customer segment under their Consumer Duty compliance activity, and was looking for a solution to quickly detect outcomes and fair value at a holistic customer level, and provide evidence of the interventions to the FCA and its own board.
Moneyhub built a customer metric and detection framework, and decisioning model across multiple products for the customer segments in question. When run across the holistic customer data, the client could quantify situations, actions and customer behaviours thus enabling the detection and projection of consumers’ outcomes. They could also better identify if a customer was, or could in the future become, at risk of becoming vulnerable. In addition, the framework provides a Consumer Duty outcome report to evidence compliance, and an always-on messaging framework to continually nudge and encourage customers from good outcome to good outcome.
Get in touch to see how Moneyhub can help support and engage your customers with our Detect, Intervene and Report solutions using chained nudges to bolster and accelerate your Consumer Duty strategies in 2024 and beyond.
All powerful and sitting comfortably in my pocket is my smartphone. Though weighing just 171 grammes it knows when I stir from sleep and when I switch off for the day. It knows details of my commute – the home I leave, the workplace I reach, even my recreational running routes. It knows the books I read, the movies that I love, and even for how long I boil my eggs in the morning! Against this backdrop of hyper-connectivity and swathes of data, comes the FCA’s advice-guidance boundary review.
Outlined in the FCA’s DP23/5 consultation are three fundamental changes which create huge opportunities for firms ready to embrace data powered digital experiences:
Loosening of the current ‘binary’ advice regime
Targeted support for customer groups built around shared characteristics i.e. ‘customers like me’
Simplified advice to tackle less complex needs
These proposals represent a significant stride toward modernising financial services. Primarily, they aim to resolve three key flaws in the current long term saving, investment and retirement planning markets, namely:
The cost of taking advice: Trying to eliminate all consumer harms by throwing people, process and compliance at the problem mean current models are too expensive for most consumers
The cost of not taking advice: Consumers are missing out on the potential for higher returns or make bad decisions because it’s all too complicated
Consumer capability: Not knowing when (or who) to go to for help, or if it will be worth it
What if there were a way to address all of the above that was widely accessible, was automated, repeatable and scalable to keep costs low, and where a consumer’s own data provided an audit trail to evidence suitability and constantly improve upon consumer outcomes?
Moneyhub’s smart Open Finance platform gives firms the tools and intelligence they need to identify customers who might benefit from one of the new forms of guidance or support. Firms can quickly and easily gather consumer data upon which to base their guidance and create automated next best actions, on a 121 basis or for cohorts of customers, including signposting to full advice or opening and managing simple products. When a customer’s personal circumstances or a firm’s products change, Moneyhub can identify the changes and nudge the customer to take action to keep them on track.
The FCA’s consultation paper highlights that only 8% of UK consumers received full financial advice in 2022 and is seeking to examine how innovation could expand the market to new forms of advice and support because 'The gap between holistic financial advice that is unaffordable for many, and guidance that is free to access but not personal to the consumer, is simply too vast’.
Moneyhub’s own innovation research with consumers routinely shows that when it comes to their money most people want to know just three things: What have they got, are they doing ok, and what to do next? However, even asking simple questions about their personal finances can create fear, complacency and disengagement amongst many people for whom getting advice about their money is neither affordable nor accessible.
By contrast, allowing customers to share their financial data using Open Banking and Open Finance provides a rich and accurate picture of exactly what they have and how they live. Data can identify opportunities to help customers such as finding spare cash that could be put to better long term use, visually showing them the impact of regular saving and the effect of compounding, or gathering all of their retirement assets in one digital location to show them a range of retirement possibilities based on their own personalised goals and as a precursor to full advice.
At Moneyhub we are firmly of the view that combining our technology with the FCA's proposals to relax the advice-guidance boundary represents one of the most exciting opportunities in a generation for financial service providers to redefine their approach to long term savings and better serve their customers.
Leading financial services firms such as Standard Life, L&G, Lloyds Bank, Scottish Widows, Mercer, Aon and Nationwide Building Society already trust Moneyhub’s technology because they see the potential for superior customer engagement and consumer outcomes through data powered customer journeys.
The FCA’s consultation does not close until the end of February 2024 however there’s no need to wait. Moneyhub’s white label Open Finance platform is helping consumers take control of their money and increase financial wellness across a range of savings, borrowing and retirement planning use cases. Moneyhub’s digital tools offer the prospect of supporting many more consumers with their financial decisions in future. Imagine a world where, over breakfast, your customers will quickly approve an automated sweep of some spare money to their ISA whilst waiting for their eggs to boil.
Simon Ripton is Moneyhub’s Proposition Director and a former IFA
With over 47.5 billion financial transactions taking place each year in the UK, how can your business quickly and easily aggregate, enrich and analyse this data to provide rich, actionable insight to engage customers, inform future business strategy, drive growth, and support Consumer Duty compliance - all without costly, complex integrations?
Say hello to the AI-powered, Always-On Decisioning and Messaging Platform from Moneyhub, ready to revolutionise your customer journey with Next Best Action technology: automated, personalised interventions for your customers - made at exactly the right time.
As a lender, you have access to huge volumes of customer data - from financial transactions, account information, demographics and more. Insight from this data has incredible potential for your business, but making sense of it manually, in real time, is impossible. Advanced AI tools are the key to interpretation: ultra-accurate categorisation, instant identification of trends, and translation into powerful insights enable firms like yours to gain a truly holistic view of your customers and develop hyper-personalised and timely customer communications strategies to nudge customers toward better financial outcomes - increasing customer loyalty and trust, boosting revenue, and bolstering Consumer Duty compliance.
Moneyhub’s AI-Powered, Always-On Decisioning and Messaging Platform is already revolutionising the way many financial institutions, including CMA9 banks and leading lenders, operate - with Moneyhub’s partners:
Confidently lending to up to 30% more customers
Reducing default rates by up to 50%
What impact could that level of growth mean for your business?
Not all categorisation engines are created equal. Using machine learning and natural language processing techniques to categorise, enrich and analyse customer data, the platform takes billions of transactions and categorises with acute accuracy, allowing you to make sense of your customer financial data in a way never seen before. Identify key risk indicators within your customer base, such as the detection of gambling transactions with industry-leading accuracy of 99.46%, allowing you to act on this information to make better informed lending decisions.
Via powerful AI, the Always-On Decisioning and Messaging Platform instantly identifies risks and trends that would otherwise be buried in the ‘noise’. Valuable customer segments are highlighted, such as those deemed as vulnerable, allowing you to deliver hyper-personalised messaging to prompt the right action for a particular individual, at the right time.
Build a community of customers who trust and engage with your products and service in a whole new, deeper way. Data-powered chained nudges influence behavioural change by prompting timely, relevant actions when customers are most receptive. Each customer is taken on their own journey at their own pace, leading to a situation where every customer gets a unique interactional experience with your business.
By integrating always-on messaging via chained nudges, businesses like yours can quickly start to engage with customers in a far more ‘human’ way through your own data, behaviours and brand language, building a different narrative across multiple different customer cohorts, to message and direct customers towards the best course of action. For example; mortgage lenders could nudge customers when their loan-to-value ratio is high, prompting them to consider refinancing at a lower rate, whilst banks may nudge customers to consolidate high-interest debt when account balances rise.
The platform uses Moneyhub’s pioneering methodology of ‘chaining together’ nudges to support consumer education towards positive financial behaviours - a key aspect of the Consumer Duty. These ‘chains’, or journeys, mirror the natural progression of behavioural change, providing insight, support or useful education material at timely moments; a capability unique to Moneyhub. Nudges are automatically generated based on triggers from our market-leading categorisation engine, meaning that nudges are relevant and appropriate for each customer, thus achieving ultra-high engagement and conversion.
Learn more - where would we like this link to go? Is here ok?
[Insert image of nudges from a client here - not PFT]
View an applicant’s entire financial world - something not possible with credit checks alone. Get ready for automated, instant Affordability checks with real-time income and spending transaction insight, which alongside your own risk metrics, helps your business make faster, automated lending decisions. Detect when an applicant’s financial situation changes throughout a product’s lifecycle and provide support, reducing harm and encouraging lifetime customer engagement.
With Moneyhub’s AI-powered, Always-On Decisioning and Messaging Platform, access powerful Consumer Duty reporting tools that can be used to evidence better customer support, actions and outcomes. The Consumer Duty raises the bar for FCA regulated firms, expecting that consumers should receive communications they can understand, products and services that meet their needs and offer fair value, and that they get the customer support they need, when they need it, so that they can use and enjoy the full benefits of the products and services they buy.
For the last 10 years, Moneyhub has been providing technology to financial institutions to enable them to understand their customers’ financial lives by tracking, categorising and analysing behaviours in relation to spending habits and their overall financial situation. This consumer view, via our personal wealth management app, is unique to Moneyhub and enables machine learning (via consumer feedback) to constantly improve categorisation and insight, meaning your business can now take appropriate action via chained nudges with a higher degree of accuracy than any other categorisation engine on the market - and report on actions taken to clearly evidence Consumer Duty compliance.
With a simple ‘plug and play’ integration option, there’s no need to wait for resource to be allocated and the technology to be designed and built. Moneyhub’s platform can be rapidly incorporated into your existing tech stack, meaning your business can start seeing positive results straight away.
What’s more, the platform is ultra-extensible, and can be fully integrated with other systems as needed. For example, adding outside data to your existing data set can be easily achieved by including Moneyhub's Open Data Aggregation Engine - giving access to the widest range of consent-driven personal financial data on the market, to support holistic decisions, including cross-sell.
Get in touch to see how Moneyhub’s market-leading platform can help harness the power of your customer financial data, boost your business growth, and support Consumer Duty compliance into 2024 and beyond.
Read more: Improving the customer lifecycle
At the beginning of November, City AM reported that adults in Britain are set to plunge themselves into a frightening £3.7bn worth of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) debt before Christmas. As the news swept through our inboxes at Moneyhub, so did a growing sense of alarm.
The strain this puts on the financial health of both individuals and their families ends up significantly impacting mental wellbeing. On top of dealing with spiralling finances, familial relationships are put under strain, sense of isolation increases, and children may even end up carrying poor money habits into their futures.
A study from the Royal College of Psychiatrists found that half of all adults with a debt problem also live with mental ill-health. This ranged from a consistent feeling of anxiety and low mood to a diagnosed mental health condition.
Worrying about debt can affect sleep. Losing out on a good night’s sleep can not only affect mood and energy levels, it can also affect someone’s ability to work or maintain relationships.
Add Christmas into the mix - 3 in 10 claim their mental health takes a ‘nosedive’ over Christmas, with affording presents and food (29%) and worry over January debt (29%) among the greatest contributors - and it’s a recipe for disaster.
BNPL is so attractive to so many, because it’s so convenient. Unregulated credit is now just a few taps away, enticingly positioned at the checkouts of e-commerce sites; the logos are bright, the branding is aspirational. Debt has never looked so appealing.
Consumers can now take on instant debt for a takeaway, clothing or cleaning supplies. Unfortunately, it’s people that may need credit for household goods who are often the most economically vulnerable. As history has shown, when the risks of some financial products are poorly communicated, those products can leave those in dire need of support even worse off.
One of the key pillars of financial wellness is providing tools and resources that foster financial resilience and the development of healthy money habits. And, in line with Consumer Duty regulations introduced by the FCA earlier this year, financial services firms shoulder some of the responsibility for helping consumers get there.
Open Finance solutions, embedded in tools consumers already use, such as banking, pensions or investment apps, offer a practical way forward.
66% of Brits check their mobile banking app at least once a week. Technology like Moneyhub’s means they could also connect all of their other bank accounts, loans, pensions, mortgages, credit cards, and access budgeting, analysis and forecasting tools, a Personal Debt Manager, embedded credit scoring, an Emergency Cash Builder and set longer term Savings Goals, at the exact same time, through the exact same app.
These tools can help people make more informed financial decisions (such as waiting for those trainers to go into the sale, rather than taking on BNPL debt) and empowers them to cultivate healthy money management habits, eliminate debt and build essential rainy day funds.
The very idea of engaging with finances, assessing income and expenditure and making a budget can evoke feelings of overwhelm and anxiety in the average consumer. We must make these steps as easy, intuitive and convenient as possible for people.
By making financial wellness solutions just as accessible as credit options, we can bridge the gap between potentially harmful convenience and responsible financial practices. Empowering individuals with the knowledge and tools to navigate their finances effectively creates a win-win scenario. Not only do customers achieve better financial outcomes, but businesses also establish stronger, long-lasting relationships built on trust and mutual benefit, with consumers whose capacity to save or invest is increasing.
The £3.7bn projection may be music to the ears of retail, but it should sound the alarm for financial services, serving as a stark reminder of the Consumer Duty regulations and encouraging closer collaboration with consumer wellbeing groups.
Christmas is only a payday or two away, and many people across the UK will be feeling the financial and emotional strain.
In the run-up to Christmas, our spending habits change. The Bank of England found that the typical UK household will spend £749 more in December than in other months - a 29% increase.
But, not everyone has that cash to spare.
We have partnered with financial inclusion technology company Inbest, to integrate their Benefits Calculator into our Personal Financial Management platform.
November 6-10th 2023 was Talk Money Week - an initiative from the Money and Pensions Service that seeks to help people have more open conversations about their money - from pocket money to pensions - and continue these conversations all year round.
Money is a deeply emotive topic, and the anxiety, guilt or shame someone might feel around their finances may mean they find it difficult to talk about. Yet research has shown that people who do talk about money make better, less risky financial decisions, feel less anxious and can help their children form good lifetime money habits.
For the course of Talk Money Week we focused on one Moneyhub feature each day, that can help you to help your customers start talking money. Here’s the round up:
Understanding how much money is coming in, and where it is going out is the first fundamental step towards financial wellness.
One of the most significant sources of financial stress is not knowing if there'll be enough money left at the end of the month. As cash usage continues to decline the increased use of 'Digital' money means its harder than ever to keep track of direct debits, BNPL repayments, ad hoc bills and spending on debit, credit cards or payment services like Paypal.
Our budgeting, forecasting and analysis features make getting those healthy foundations in place as easy and intuitive as possible.
Users are encouraged to connect all of their spending accounts to give them a complete picture of their finances. Our technology can then identify income, regular bills and payments and the spending and income analysis helps build a very tangible, visual representation of what’s going where.
Every transaction is categorised so that the customer can create and set spending budgets for things such as fuel for the car, the weekly food shop, clothes for the kids or home repairs. No matter what account or card is used to make a payment the category is identified and allocated to the correct budget so they can see where their money goes and, when they are in danger of going over budget and take avoiding action.
UK adults owe £1.9t in personal debt. Failing to keep on top of debt can impact health, wellbeing and the ability to work.
A study from the Royal College of Psychiatrists found that half of all adults with a debt problem also live with mental ill-health. This ranged from a consistent feeling of anxiety and low mood to a diagnosed mental health condition.
Debt can be a considerable burden, made worse by dealing with it alone.
Worrying about debt can affect sleep. Losing out on a good night’s sleep can not only affect mood and energy levels, it can also affect someone’s ability to work or have good relationships with friends and family.
All of these things in turn can further add to debt problems.
Our Personal Debt Manager gives your customers a suite of tools to help them check, manage and adjust their spending so they stay in control of their income and outgoings.
We know that people get better outcomes when when:
They regularly check income, outgoing and bank statements, and;
Adjust spending on non-essentials when money is tight
Your customers can use Personal Debt Manager to connect all of their bank accounts, credit cards and loans in one place so they can check each and every transaction in real time. They’ll benefit from a range of tools, including Personal Balance Alerts, Spending Analysis, Regular Payments and Rent Recognition.
By utilising these tools, your customers can:
Gain sight of where their money is going and where changes need to be made and set realistic budgets
Reduce the risk of missing a repayment as they have a full list of upcoming payments to help them plan in advance
Even build their credit score through Rent Recognition
Eliminating debt is about more than the numbers - debt relief brings reduced stress and anxiety, improvements in cognitive functioning and changes in decision making. When someone clears their debt, it’s a significant life event.
With Moneyhub, you can help them get there.
Be it building an emergency cash fund for whatever life throws at them, or saving towards that all important first home, our technology can help you become a significant force for financial good in your customers’ lives.
With the Financial Conduct Authority reporting that nearly 13m UK adults have little capacity to withstand a financial shock, helping your customers build an emergency fund to weather a financial storm, or simply for a rainy day, can improve financial outcomes, build trust in your brand and deepen the relationship they have with your firm.
Moneyhub’s Emergency Cash Builder makes it easy for your customers to increase their financial resilience in three simple steps:
Personalise: Choose a connected account in which the emergency cash fund will be created and give the fund a name. It could be simply an ‘emergency fund’, or something more personal, such as ‘my holiday fund’ or ‘Mum’s 60th birthday’. Customers can create multiple funds for different goals. After naming their emergency cash fund the customer will be prompted to set a target amount and time period over which they wish to save.
Monitor: Each Emergency Cash Fund will automatically appear in the customer’s personal dashboard. They’ll see how much they’ve saved in total and how close they are to achieving their goal.
Celebrate: Moneyhub’s dashboard view provides a visual measure of success. Overlay a nudge in the app or any other communications channel to help the customer celebrate their achievement and provide them with an onward journey.
Customers can transfer money to their Emergency Cash Builder fund using their bank’s banking app or by creating a standing order. Or if enabled, they can use Moneyhub Open Banking payments technology to make a payment from within a Personal Financial Management app.
When people have some savings to fall back on, their increased financial resilience leads to reduced stress and anxiety, a greater sense of choice and control and even higher self esteem. With Moneyhub, you can help your customers get there.
According to Policy in Practice around 8 Million households in the UK are missing out on £16-19 billion in benefits every year. This works out at around £5k per household, every year - a potential lifeline for low-income households.
In 2021, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Welfare at a Social Distance found that the most common reason why people miss their benefits is that they are unaware of the welfare benefits they are entitled to or assume that they are not eligible
The main reasons people are not taking up benefits they are aware of:
Group A: 42% Wrongly assume they are not entitled
Group B: 39% Unaware of the range of benefits they could be entitled to
Group C: 19% Don’t apply because they are overwhelmed by the process, or find the stigma difficult to deal with
Description text goes hereWe’ve embedded InBest’s Benefits Finder into our Personal Financial Management solution, enabling people to identify benefits they may be eligible for based on their financial data.
The benefits calculator can help those in Groups A and B to find out which benefits they are eligible for and the boost to their income they could receive.
By incorporating the calculator into a financial management app, we can better serve Group C through personalised nudges and support articles, to help guide them through their benefits applications.
It’s no secret that the pensions industry has an engagement problem. In 2020 the Financial Conduct Authority found 59% of adults contributing to a workplace DC pension have low, or very low pension engagement.
Low levels of engagement correspond with low levels of understanding around pensions, and people are missing out on a better retirement.
In fact, one in five pensioners is now living in relative poverty in the UK, with the number of financially insecure pensioners soaring to more than two million.
With the government’s work on the Pensions Dashboard Programme stalled, our Pension Finder offers an interim tool to help people track down, understand and engage with their pensions.
Pension Finder allows people to build a full picture of their pension and make crucial retirement plans by connecting the Moneyhub app with their LinkedIn profile.
It is designed to help pension managers, workplace pension providers, trustees or advisors help their customers engage with their pensions, encourage them to save more cash for retirement and understand the long-term implications of their current financial situation and savings strategies.
Users can combine the pensions information found by analysing their career history with other information aggregated and calculated by Moneyhub in tools such as Moneyhub’s Lifestyle Modeller, which predicts people’s financial situation after a major event such as retirement to set lifestyle expectations.
When people have a complete financial picture they are able to make better decisions or get the help they need. The Pension Finder seeks to make financial admin easier and ultimately encourage savers to take positive steps to secure their future financial wellness.
You can offer your customers any of these features as part of our fully customisable white label financial management app, or incorporate them into your own offering as widgets.
In today's rapidly evolving banking industry, technology and user experience play a crucial role in providing innovative financial solutions. The emergence of digital platforms, mobile banking apps, and online payment systems has fundamentally changed the way customers interact with banks.
Customers now expect seamless and convenient digital experiences, forcing banks to invest heavily in technology and user experience to stay competitive. So, now the majority of banks have their own modern and intuitive apps, how do they differentiate themselves?
The products that banks offer remain largely the same from institution to institution; current accounts, savings, loans and mortgages, ISAs and so on.
The key to thriving in this disruptive landscape will be going beyond surface-level advancements and shifting from product centricity to customer centricity and personalisation.
And banks can only truly become customer-centric by adopting Open Finance technology.
Open Finance offers a transformative opportunity for banks to gain valuable insights into their customers' financial lives, personalise their offerings, understand their customers better and help improve their financial health, ultimately driving growth and customer loyalty.
Open Finance allows banks to tap into a wealth of financial data, providing a comprehensive view of customers' financial lives. By leveraging this data, banks can gain insights into the products and services customers hold with competitors. This helps banks personalise their marketing strategies and tailor their offerings to meet customers' specific needs and preferences. By providing tailored solutions, banks can increase customer engagement, stem leakage and attract new business.
Equipped with detailed knowledge of customers' financial situations, including their holdings with competitors, banks can offer personalised marketing messages and services/products that resonate on a deeper, more individual level. By tailoring recommendations and offerings based on customer needs, banks can enhance the customer experience and create a real sense of trust and loyalty. This personalised approach allows banks to stand out in a crowded market and win over customers who value personalised financial solutions.
Open Finance empowers customers by putting them in control of their financial data and fostering transparency. Banks that embrace open finance demonstrate their commitment to delivering customer-centric solutions and help customers take control of their finances. By providing comprehensive financial insights, personalised services, and tools to improve financial wellbeing, banks can build strong relationships with customers, who will see these banks as instrumental in helping them achieve their financial goals, resulting in increased satisfaction and loyalty.
Let’s say a bank onboards a new, younger customer who is just getting established. They may have some debt, no savings and a low-level of financial literacy leading to feelings of anxiety and confusion with where to start.
If that bank’s offering is centred around financial wellbeing and built on Open Finance, they can help that customer take control of their spending, encourage micro-savings to clear debt and eventually build an emergency cash fund. As the customer’s financial health improves, they may find more money at the end of each month to save for a rainy day fund, or even towards a first house.
Savings capacity depends upon people having available money. At Moneyhub, we call this available money Potential. It’s the money left after non-discretionary spend is subtracted from income.
When that customer is in a place to start looking at or applying for a mortgage, who will be at the forefront of their mind as a trusted, helpful mortgage provider? Their bank who helped them reach their financial goals in the first place.
By helping customers increase their Potential, banks can ultimately boost their own assets.
In a world where customer expectations and competition are constantly evolving, embracing Open Finance technology is essential for banks seeking to maintain long-term success. By leveraging the power of Open Finance, banks can gain valuable customer insight, personalise their marketing and services, and build strong relationships centred around customer primacy and financial wellness.
It also makes sense that there are a number of ways Open Finance can help you comply with Consumer Duty, the most customer-centric regulation to touch financial services.
As technology continues to shape the banking industry, it's the banks that prioritise understanding and improving their customers' financial health, placing customer, not product, at the heart of their strategy, that will thrive in this disruptive landscape.
You might also like: How can Open Finance help bridge the UK Savings Gap?
We are faced with a rapidly changing financial world. High inflation has been met with increasing interest rates - something this generation hasn’t previously experienced. But even in these challenging times, people should be thinking about how they can take advantage of these changes, and they can.
Many of us are waiting for interest rates to ‘go back down’. To return to the happy, low rates we have become accustomed to. But that just isn’t going to happen. We are returning to “normal rates” and historically low, sub-1% interest rates have been the anomaly. The challenge we have is that over the last 15 years, people’s financial habits have changed and adapted to the low interest rate environment. People have forgotten how to save and we now have a whole generation of adults that have never thought about saving as a necessity (myself included, I graduated from university in 2008 just as the rates were getting cut. For my entire working life I have never been rewarded for saving cash).
We, as an industry, need to help the British public realise their savings potential in this new world.
But how do we undo 15 years of behaviour change? How do we support customers through this new financial reality? Luckily there have been massive advances in Artificial Intelligence, behavioural economics and banking technology (including Open Banking) to help us tackle this problem.
The power of little nudges
Behavioural economics is the key to unlocking savings potential. It can be leveraged to help people make positive financial decisions and design experiences that optimise propensity to save. But before you can nudge anyone, you need to understand them and their financial situation. Nudges need to be well designed, timely interventions with minimal friction to action.
Moneyhub’s nudge technology combines a consumer’s financial data with industry leading financial analytics to understand the most appropriate nudge for a consumer to help them save (or even if saving is the best thing for that individual or not). Open Banking payments and Variable Recurring Payments for sweeping are then utilised to make the act of saving truly frictionless.
There is no “one size fits all” nudge that will be effective for everyone and this is vitally important to understand. Applying the principles of behavioural economics to savings provides a range of options for nudging people.
Examples of nudge interventions include:
The Payday Nudge
The regular savings optimiser
Buy now. Save now (Round-up savings)
The smart financial assistant
The Payday Nudge
By making payday the day that you save your spare cash, you build the habit of saving money without the individual realising.
With consent, Moneyhub’s Open Banking platform can track your day to day finances and identify your payday. It identifies the frequency of your paydays and how much you get paid each time. We then map this pattern against your expenditure to identify when you have spare cash on your payday and when you can afford to sweep cash into savings.
Open Banking payments is then used to easily sweep that money into savings. Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) allows this to be done automatically if consent is given when setting up the rule.
A key principle of behavioural economics is to make the desired action the default option (in this case, to encourage the customer to save). By utilising VRP, the default option is to save spare cash - a powerful driver for increasing savings.
The regular savings optimiser
Some people may not feel comfortable handing the fate of their savings over to the robot overlords quite yet and instead would prefer to opt for the more traditional approach of setting up a regular savings amount. On a certain day of each month a certain amount of money will be swept into your savings account.
This is also a great mechanism for saving, again it sets the default to save each month but it sounds awfully like a Standing Order - what’s so special about that? By utilising Open Banking, customers can achieve exactly the same outcome, but with an intelligent twist or two. When setting up the standing order, you can help your customer identify how much they can realistically save by analysing their banking transactions. Once this regular saver has been set up, you can proactively monitor their finances to identify opportunities to either increase their regular savings (especially if they are also utilising a personal financial management tool to budget more effectively) or even to identify ad-hoc opportunities to sweep a bit of extra spare cash.
Round-up savings
A tried and tested mechanism for getting people to save where they don’t usually is the Round-Up savings proposition. The idea is simple; if you spend £4.40 on your favourite Spiced Nut Milk Latte, your app can round that transaction up to £5 and sweep that 60p into savings.
So far, this proposition has had some limitations, namely the sweeping is not real-time; providers add the round-ups together over the course of a couple of weeks and then sweep one large amount from your account. Which defeats the point of the round-up savings.
Open Banking and VRP allows you to offer this to your customers instantly and seamlessly by leveraging Moneyhub’s APIs.
The smart financial assistant
Some people may require a little more assistance before they can start to put money aside. This is where personal financial management capabilities and smart sweeping combine to help individuals really improve their financial wellbeing.
Moneyhub’s personal financial management APIs help people understand their situation and take control of their finances. Holistic budgeting tools and smart, personalised insights into spending habits help reduce expenditure and create the space to save.
Once people have some spare capacity, smart nudges can identify the additional cash and sweep it into savings.
We are barely scratching the surface on how AI and Open Banking data can leverage behavioural economics to help consumers save. It is vital that in these changing times, people are building up their savings and improving their financial resilience, all whilst avoiding having their cash eroded by inflation. Moneyhub is working tirelessly to improve the financial wellbeing of people across the country and we are opening up our APIs so that other innovative companies can do the same. Learn more about ‘Smart Saving’ and how together, we can help people adjust their spending and saving behaviours, in line with this day and age.
Written by: Jon Hart, API Partnerships Director
As Pensions Awareness Week 2023 draws to a close, we’re reminded that 59% of adults contributing to a workplace DC pension have low, or very low pension engagement. Now is clearly the time for employers to be developing plans on how to better support staff with their retirement planning.
Low engagement isn’t good news for pension providers, individuals, nor the companies that employ them.
Leading the charge in boosting pension awareness is Moneyhub partner Standard Life. Standard Life’s Retirement Voice 2022 found that people who dedicate time to pension planning, are reaping benefits to their wider financial wellbeing:
They are almost three times more likely to feel more positive about their financial situation
More likely to feel confident in making financial decisions
More likely to enjoy retirement
But, despite these benefits, and the cost of living crisis encouraging more people to pay closer attention to their finances, their research shows that “when it comes to retirement planning, the vast majority of people (72%) are still doing little, if anything.”
Within the report, Standard Life put these low levels of engagement down to the advice and guidance gap, lack of education and support, and feelings of overwhelm when people do come across guidance or information on their pensions.
People who are not engaging with their pensions tend to have poorer financial wellbeing overall, with 66% worrying they are not saving enough for when they’re older and 47% feeling less confident in their ability to make good financial decisions.
For individuals, this leads to feelings of stress and anxiety, which in turn can lead to reduced productivity and performance for the companies that employ them.
While employers are beginning to recognise that financial wellbeing goes beyond paying salaries, it is still the least common area included in HR wellbeing strategies. Yet, as Gail Izat, Workplace Managing Director at Standard Life states, “employers are perfectly positioned to provide the information and guidance people need, because they can incorporate it into their workplace pension offering.”
In the midst of the cost of living crisis and the widening UK savings gap, it’s more important than ever that employers demonstrate a commitment to the financial wellbeing of their staff.
The good news is, with Open Finance technology like ours, it’s never been easier.
Pension engagement is one part of the puzzle. If people are struggling with debt, managing their day-to-day finances or even focused on saving money for something like their first home, paying attention to or contributing more to their pension will be low on their list of priorities. For people to have healthy finances in retirement, they must adopt healthy financial habits through their working lives.
Standard Life has understood this and incorporated Money Mindset, built on our Open Finance capabilities, into their workplace offering.
Incorporating an Open Finance proposition like Money Mindset truly sets Standard Life’s offering apart.
Money Mindset offers users a complete picture of their entire financial world (current accounts, savings, properties, investments, pensions and more) alongside forecasting tools and even a financial education hub.
Providers who adopt these solutions will be the ones who see higher levels of engagement from employers, really differentiating their offering in a crowded market. They can work with clients to augment Employer Value Propositions and bring a host of benefits to their end-users.
Fostering a more financially literate and resilient workforce benefits all parties mentioned in this blog post. Individuals gain confidence in managing daily spending and unexpected costs, get greater control and understanding of where their money is coming and going out, and get on track for a secure and sustainable financial future into retirement.
Employers reap the rewards of higher productivity and performance, reduced absenteeism and employee stress or burnout and become more attractive to, and better at retaining, top talent.
And of course, pension providers benefit from primacy among workplace clients and members, higher level of engagement and increased opportunities to boost AUM through consolidation or higher contributions. It’s win-win-win!
Would you like to find out more about how Open Finance could benefit your business? Talk to one of our guides →
The UK savings gap is a hugely pressing issue. The amount and rate at which working people are saving money for retirement is at a significant disparity with the amount required for a desirable living standard in later life.
Deloitte projects that the savings gap in the UK will reach a staggering £350 billion by 2050. This highlights the urgency to address the issue and find effective solutions to ensure individuals are prepared for their financial future.
Various factors contribute to the UK savings gap; increasing living costs, consumer debt, and a lack of sufficient financial education. Encouragingly, efforts have been made by the government and financial institutions to address this issue by introducing legislative changes and initiatives aimed at promoting savings, such as auto-enrolment, increased ISA flexibility, and the Personal Savings Allowance, but there’s still more to be done.
Savings capacity depends upon people having available money. At Moneyhub, we call this available money Potential. It’s the money left after non-discretionary spend is subtracted from income.
By helping users increase their Potential we can enable them to put more money in savings, investments or their pensions.
According to the FCA, over a third (34%) of UK adults have less than £1,000 in their savings. For 18-24 year olds, that figure jumps to 47%.
These shaky foundations mean that as people then move through their late twenties and into their thirties, they may struggle to build savings capacity for things like a first home. Many are renting and may have taken on debt to get through the day-to-day.
So how can Open Finance help people establish themselves financially with firm foundations to build upon? And how can it help financial services engage them?
Whilst no amount of tools can make up for chronic low income or help families who simply do not have enough money to make ends meet, most money advisors say that the key to staying in control is to monitor transactions, set and stick to budgets and avoid missing regular payments.
Our technology is designed to help people do just that. You can embed the following solutions within your own offering to help users manage their money better, and make it easy to do so:
Financial MOT
Budgets and Forecasts
Credit Score Improver
Emergency Cash Builder
First Home Saver
Benefits Finder
Personal Debt Manager
Complete Personal Financial Management App
Don’t just take our word for it. Ed is a Moneyhub user and father of 3. He’s worked in hospitality, the NHS and a forklift driver, and was struggling with debts he’d built up as a younger man
He explained, “I’d built up a lot of debt on credit cards by overspending and basically not having an understanding of where my money was and simply not caring. I used to buy things I could not afford and at the end of each month I was scrabbling around for pennies”
“I really like Moneyhub’s spending budgets, in fact they were almost life changing for me. I’d miss transactions in my bank accounts and credit cards and then spend ages going back trying to work out where everything was going.”
“By creating spending categories for everything such as fuel, beer, coffees, haircuts…all sorts of things, I could work out trends using the spending and income analysis, which enabled me to compare month on month. Looking back over the year I could see what I spent on average so I used that to set budgets and then every time I got paid I was able to put aside money in my bank account knowing that everything I had left was spare money. Since then my finances have turned around completely”
Once Ed felt in control of his day-to-day spending, he naturally started engaging with his longer-term finances:
“I had connected my workplace pension to Moneyhub so when the pandemic started I could see my pension’s value. Every day I looked it was going down as share prices were going down. Before Moneyhub I’d never have known about my pension but because it’s so visual, seeing the graph is brilliant. In fact it surprised me just how quickly pensions can go up and it's made me want to pay in more, especially now I’ve got spare money at the end of the month”
Open Finance makes it easy for people to engage with their finances where they might have felt overwhelmed before. With oversight of where money is coming in and going out, incremental changes can be made, which include putting more money aside for later life.
Open Finance also offers businesses the chance to create highly personalised customer journeys throughout their financial life, resulting in stickier customers with increased Potential, to go some way to bridging the UK savings gap.
Find out more about how our technology can help you unlock your customers’ Potential →
Renters can be at a considerable deficit when it comes to the acknowledgement of regular monthly payments reflected within their credit profile.
This impacts millions of people, excluding them from improving their financial wellbeing and borrowing. Part of eliminating this inequity is rent recognition, powered by Open Banking technology.
Since financial institutions make lending decisions based on credit history, many in the renting category fall into the category of having “thin” credit files, impacting over 5 million people in the UK. Their credit profile does not reflect their consistency and reliability in rental payments, failing to reflect their full financial picture and demonstrating their eligibility for reliable repayment.
In the last two decades, the number of renting households has doubled in England and Wales. The total number in the renting segment totals 5 million households. With this increase comes the opposite effect for homeownership, which dropped from 64.3% in 2011 to 62.5% in 2021.
There are several reasons for these dramatic changes. Housebuilding rates are well below the targets set by the government. As property investors continue to enter the market, access remains limited.
With the rental market in high demand, rates are higher, growing by 10.4% in just a year. A UK tenant spends more than 28% of their pre-tax income on rent. This fiscal burden makes it difficult for renters to save money towards buying a home, none of which supports their credit score.
It’s a complex challenge, but there is a movement towards rent recognition as a means to break down obstacles for transitioning from renter to homeowner.
Lending institutions that base decisions only on traditional credit history face more risk. This narrow view also reduces the pool of candidates to become customers and the potential revenue generated.
Rent recognition has the potential to reverse this financial discrimination and be a data point to support someone’s creditworthiness. The key to facilitating this is with Open Banking. Open Banking is the process where consumers agree to share their banking data and transactions with third parties. It enables fast, secure transactions and democratises finance. It has a stable, regulated framework with significant growth. Early this year, the UK reached 7 million Open Banking users.
Rent recognition via Open Banking is beneficial for lenders and consumers. Lenders receive a more complete and accurate view of a person’s fiscal posture. It can also reduce your lending risk with this more informed view. Renters can use it to qualify for a mortgage and improve their financial well-being.
Open Banking’s foundation is the secure and consensual sharing of transactions and banking data from consumers to third parties, including rent payments. Moneyhub APIs identify and verify rent payments, then sending them on to the credit rating agency (alternatively, companies can send this on themselves).
There’s mutual benefit of implementing rent recognition for both companies and customers. Confident lending decisions can be made, supporting customers out of the rental market and into home ownership.
Learn more about rent recognition through Open Banking with Moneyhub.
The technological landscape today is almost unrecognisable from even 5 years ago. Open Banking and the evolution of Open Finance is making the sharing of financial data ever more accessible, while the exponential growth of AI and machine learning is making the insights you can drive from that data increasingly sophisticated. The opportunities for creating engaging and personalised experiences for customers is becoming endless.
With so many opportunities out there, it is hard to know where to start, or even what is the ‘art of the possible’? We are excited to take you through just a few examples of the use cases of today that can deliver the experiences of tomorrow.
When considering how to take advantage of this technology, you can think of the use cases as different ‘recipes’; each of the individual capabilities are the ‘ingredients’ and how you put them together makes the ‘recipe’. Finely chop one Open Banking data, combine with a healthy measure of AI driven insight and serve with a garnish of omnichannel communications, voila - you have one fine looking financial engagement solution. 🤌
How you chop the data, how much enrichment and insight you apply on that data and the finesse of the garnish all have an impact on the final dish, but the recipe serves to inform and inspire you as to how they should all go together. As with any recipe you can make your own tweaks and adjustments to make it to your taste and tailored to your specific requirements.
Now that we have overdone the recipe analogies, let's look at some of Moneyhub’s recipes and how we have created them from the ingredients:
Data connectivity and aggregation – whether your customer is connecting a single account, or you want to create a holistic view of all of their finances. Getting access to the data is absolutely the cornerstone to nearly all recipes. Moneyhub connects to the widest range of financial accounts in the UK, from bank accounts and credit cards, to investments, pensions, properties, mortgages, loans and even crypto and car valuations.
Enrichment – accessing the data is only the first step. To take advantage of the data, you need it to be useable and useful and the quality of the data enrichment can have a massive impact on the final product. Moneyhub has a number of enrichment algorithms that identifies key indicators, patterns and attributes to categorise and tag the data.
Transaction Categorisation – allocate the transaction to an income/spend category. This can be aligned with the Standard Financial Statement, HMRC Tax categories and even SME/business spending
Counterparty analysis – where are you spending money? Who is paying you?
Regular transaction identification – identifying patterns in expenditure. Do you have any subscriptions or regular bills? How much do you get paid? When is your payday? How regular is it?
Insights and nudges – Once you have enriched the data you can then start understand your customers and generate insights. This is where it all starts to get exciting and the opportunities explode. Gentle nudges and alerts can help individuals make positive financial decisions and reduce the stress of managing their finances. We deliver the nudge to you, via API, so how you pass this on to your customer is completely up to you and can align with your wider comms strategy.
Open Banking Payments – Combining the data and intelligence with Open Banking Payments and Sweeping (Variable Recurring Payments) makes the insights truly actionable and helps automate financial management.
By combining the data connectivity, enrichment and insights you can create a plethora of innovative experiences and use cases that drive value for you and your customers. Here are just a small selection to whet your appetite:
Smart savings
Use the connectivity and financial analytics to help customers optimise their savings potential. Identify when customers genuinely have some capacity to save and help them save it. By utilising sweeping, you can even automate the savings for your customers.
Bill Management
Combining the connectivity, transaction categorisation, counterparty analysis and recurring transaction identification; customers can understand and effectively manage their regular bill payments. You can alert customers if they have multiple media payments or subscriptions to services they don’t use any more and even notify customers when the utility/mortgage/bill payments increase.
Rent Recognition
Another great use for the Counterparty analysis and recurring transaction identification is to confirm an individual is paying their rent regularly and on time. This information can be reported to the Credit Reference Agencies to help improve customers credit score, or you could just use it for your own affordability decisioning or rental reference checks.
Factfinding
When giving financial advice or making financial recommendations, it is imperative that you understand your client’s entire financial situation. By combining the extensive connectivity and categorisation you can quickly and easily understand the full picture of their finances. A breakdown of Assets and Liabilities and cash flow with a window into the granular detail, such as holdings information and fund codes for all external investments.
Affordability/eligibility decisioning
The deep financial analytics can be applied to understanding an applicant’s true affordability. You can get a real-time and detailed breakdown of a consumer’s income, outgoings and if there are any spending habits that may be risk factors to affordability (such as a high gambling spend, or repayments to other lenders). The analytics identify whether there are any missed Direct Debits or bill payments that have been missed.
CO2 Footprinting
Moneyhub has partnered with Connect Earth and Sugi.Earth to extend the possibilities for financial engagement even further. Customers can understand how both their spending habits and their investments and pension choices are affecting the environment and get personalised CO2 impact reports and recommendations.
This is just a selection of what can be done with financial data APIs. There are so many more opportunities specific to your sector and industry. You can learn more about existing ‘recipes’ using Moneyhub APIs, can get in touch to see how we can work together to further your innovation.
Written by: Jon Hart, API Partnerships Director
How the world pays has changed dramatically since technology became part of the process. A pivotal advancement in these recent changes has been Open Banking Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs). Open Banking VRPs are beginning to drive the change regarding how customers pay for goods and services. As a result of more interconnected accounts, payments are more convenient, and transactions have seen a marked improvement in security.
We're thrilled to announce the creation of the Open Finance Developers Group (OFDG), a meet-up group aimed at fostering innovation, communication and connection in the Open Finance and Open Banking communities.
Whether you want to create your own solution, or you want us to do it for you — we have the technology for it. Our experienced team is here to support you now and in the future.
