Moven Promotes Financial Health With ‘Smart Savings Account’

The launch of the Smart Savings Account™ by Moven provides a new way for consumers to build and engage with their savings across mobile devices and wearables.

Moven has always provided the mobile-first consumer a way to manage their money with a highly intuitive and engaging experience. The Moven app combines basic banking services (checking, debit card and mobile payment capabilities) with real-time digital receipts,  money management tools, and proactive alerts based on a customer’s account history. Combining contextual insights with personalized interactive comparison tools, Moven customers have become some of the most engaged in the industry.

Starting an a mobile-only banking organization, Moven has since been transformed into a Software-as-a-Service solution that has enabled other banking organizations to accelerate their digital transformation.  Organizations such as New Zealand’s Westpac and TD Bank in Canada have partnered with Moven to provide innovative digital capabilities that have grown their customer bases and improved satisfaction.

Leveraging their team of designers, technologists, data scientists, strategists and financial services veterans, Moven announced today the launch of the Moven Smart Savings Account, a new way for customers to engage with savings across mobile and wearables. The launch of Smart Savings Account will begin with an exclusive invitation-only release to the U.S. consumer market. Moven’s brand fans and industry insiders will be the target audience for the initial roll out, with a full roll-out expected shortly thereafter.

The Moven Smart Savings Account™ is the latest example of Moven’s goal of providing behavioral-based financial advice built into full-service banking capabilities. According to Moven, the timing of the Moven Smart Savings Account couldn’t be better, with the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) reporting that “57% of American adults are struggling financially … and are looking for help to achieve financial health.”

Brett King, Moven’s Founder and CEO, explains “Moven’s proprietary spending insights, behavioral savings and gamification of financial advice eliminates the need for a monthly budget to save. Simply put, we help customers control their spending and recognize their gains every day in real-time. We provide moments to naturally stash those gains into smart savings. Our app and messaging architecture makes saving behaviors effortless.”

A Personalized Savings Path

The Moven Smart Savings Account experience starts with Savings Path, a feature that guides customers along their daily savings journey. Moven believes there is a structural problem in the financial services industry today where consumers are encouraged to spend at every turn, whether via the promise of airline miles, rewards or cash back. There’s almost no incentive beyond very low interest rates that requires a consumer to lock money away for long months at a time. Moven has taken a fundamentally different approach to this problem and built a model that changes a consumer’s behavior to accumulate more and more savings over time. It is believed that they are the only bank account or debit card in the world that currently works in this manner to encourage savings.

Personalization is a key characteristic of the Savings Path, which was designed to match individual savings needs and preferences, regardless of where a consumer is in his or her savings journey. For customers who have never saved, Savings Path makes it easy to get started, and imagine the investment and retirement savings road ahead.

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Customers can choose to stash money any time on-demand or when Moven detects and recommends an opportune savings moment. Through a partnership with Envestnet and their Yodlee financial data platform, Moven integrates with customers’ other investment and retirement savings accounts as well if the customer prefers.

For customers who have already started to save and invest, Moven provides insights and the holistic context needed to get and keep control of finances. The result is the expansion of Moven’s Smart Banking offering to include savings functionality with built-in financial advice to match a customer’s needs and personal preferences.

Visually, Savings Path communicates the full savings cycle as a natural journey by incorporating short-term savings into a StashIt and ‘wish-list’, and longer-term savings into Invest and Retire actions. Savings Path helps the customer visualize savings as a progressive, multi-step journey, not a list of accounts. It is the first multi-faceted savings behavior-based tool of it’s kind in the world.

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To promote the new savings experience, Moven is offering a 5% bonus on the Moven Smart Savings Account for balances of up to $5,000. To qualify for the bonus, customers need to make Moven their go-to debit product by spending $500 or more per month, a spending level primary bank customers easily reach through their normal monthly purchases. All Moven debit card and tap-to-pay NFC purchases qualify. Moven calls this 3×5 or 5%, up to $5,000, and a minimum of $500 spend.

The Moven Smart Savings Account will also integrate with wearable devices, allowing a consumer to save money with a simple tap on with smartwatch. This Impulse Savings option will enhance the engagement of Millennials who are looking for more ways to make use of their often underutilized wearable device.

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A Savings Plan for the Digital Consumer

The target audience for the Smart Savings Account is the digital consumer (often a Millennial) who needs an easy way to save. The Bonus Interest program is an added incentive for the consumer who already uses Moven as his or her primary bank account. The message is for consumers who already spend smarter with Moven, now there is a way to save smarter as well. Research supports the need for an easy to understand savings application.

Facebook studied the financial relationships of working-age millennials (ages 21-34) in the US, including a specific profile for affluent millennials (earning $75,000+), and compared affluent millennials to Gen X and boomers. Here’s what was uncovered:

  • Millennials two main financial priorities are paying down debt (43%) and saving for the future (38%)
  • 46% say that financial success means being debt-free, 21% say owning a home is #1 with only 13% placing being able to retire as #1
  • Millennials overwhelmingly value saving, with 86% saying it’s important to them and 86% say they actually are saving
  • 54% of Millennials say they save because they want to be responsible, with only 20% say they are saving for an emergency

According to the Facebook research, the biggest issue is that many Millennials haven’t taken charge of their financial destiny. “Just 37% [of Millennials] say they have a financial plan”, says the study. “16% are unsure whether they have one. And among those without a plan, having a financial plan feels out of reach — 52% say they do not know how they would go about starting to build one.”

Opening a Moven Smart Savings Account

Like all of the Moven products, opening a Smart Savings Account and Bonus Interest is easy. It is all done quickly with a mobile device. Customers begin earning the bonus immediately, with a grace period on meeting the qualifying 3×5 in the first month. And if a participating customer’s spending falls below the qualifying spending amount and frequency, a reduced 0.5% bonus is still awarded.

Moven’s Enterprise Architect, Tim Leithead, explained this easy startup experience. “We wanted to give customers time to experience the Moven spend and save value proposition, and we wanted to give ample time to switch to Moven as their primary banking provider.”

Leithead explained further, laying out key strategic points of the Moven Smart Savings Account and the Bonus Interest promotion:

  • The product is aimed at the 40% of Americans who have no savings today. The Moven Smart Savings Account and Bonus Interest complete a cohesive call-to-action to spend and save smarter.
  • Savings Path, with its entry-level financial guidance, has a mass market appeal that Moven expects approximately 20% of its customers to adopt. (In a CFSI savings experiment, with support from AMEX, MetLife, and Ford, there was a 3-6% adoption rate without Moven’s easy to open capabilities.
  • The Smart Savings Account and the Bonus Interest are an alternate way for Moven to reapply marketing dollars on a potentially viral word-of-mouth acquisition tool
  • Savings Path is anticipated to be a gateway to Moven’s future plan for a smart investment services capability
  • There are no fees to initiate the service and there are no fees on the account

One of the strongest selling points for Moven has always been that the app is clutter free and extremely easy to use. The integration of a savings capability has been done in a way that only enhances the app. If a customer wants to check a balance, it is a button press away. If they want to track spending or saving, it is just a swipe and a click away. The app provides a highly visual interpretation of all components of finances and money management without the need to sign into multiple accounts and navigate several screens.

Every screen and button on the Moven app is easy to understand and use. It is a textbook example of the future of banking.

New Savings App in Latest in Moven Successes

The year 2016 has been a very active for the Moven team, with new international partnerships and product enhancements illustrating how innovation needs to continue, even for fintech firms that have been perennial leaders in the industry. Some of the most recent accomplishments of Moven include:

  • Introduced Westpac CashNav and TD MySpend partnerships with both products hitting #1 on their respective country app stores
  • Westpac CashNav achieved 80% customer adoption in the first 6 weeks
  • TD Canada MySpend customers use the app 5x/month or more and save $150/month more than users of the TD Banking App alone
  • Moven is considered the most successful fintech banking app, with 1m users across 3 countries today and projections of 5m by mid 2017
  • Moven has signed 3 new banks for 2017 in Asia and EU
  • The neo bank is on target for $20m in revenue in 2017

According to best selling author and leading industry influencer, Chris Skinner, digital savings apps may be the tipping point for success of fintech banks. “Savings is where the new banks have their real opportunity: to provide insights into money, spending and our lives, and by informing us of our future spending and saving needs to live well. That’s where I see the likes of Moven, Monzo, Loot and more making a difference, and to be honest, that might just be enough of a buzz to get customers to switch (along with a healthy bribe, of course!).”

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