As consumers, many of us are already familiar with the concept of banks helping us keep track of our card spending. With Open Banking helping new FinTechs grow in this area, it was only a matter of time before companies like sync and Nordigen finally come up with something a little more sophisticated.
Budgeting tools have been around for some time now, with banks like Santander being one of the first to help customers break down their card spend into useful categories:
Credit cards have long been offering benefits and perks to customers, with many banks offering rewards earnings in common quarantine spending categories, including grocery stores, streaming services and food delivery.
Let’s not forget the Google Pay and Apple Pay developments too, or Stripe who also have options for Open Banking players to set rules on cards and cardholders to control spend.
Since August last year, Ricky Lee and the team at sync have been in touch with #DisruptionBanking. It has been great to be able to share sync’s successes in growing into the Middle East and their recent partnership with Railsbank.
And just in December we covered Nordigen’s #BlackFriday moment – their announcement that they launched the first-ever free API platform.
While many of us are used to hearing stories about VISA partnering with some bank or another to offer a new service, it is less common to hear of two FinTechs forming similar partnerships.
Today sync and Nordigen announced their partnership, as many of us will be wondering how the banks missed another glaring opportunity to not just talk about innovation, but lead innovation.
The most advanced budgeting tools are here now:
4th February 2021, London – sync., the smart open banking app, has today launched Europe’s most advanced budgeting tools with more than 250 spending categories, in partnership with Nordigen.
sync. promises to manage every aspect of a user’s financial life in one place, and the new budgeting features are a major aspect of that. The new features will allow sync. users to track their spending every month.
Open banking
Not only will users be able to analyse their spending on their sync. card, but they can also get data from all of their accounts connected through Open Banking.
sync. has developed its own category set to analyse spending on sync. accounts and partners with Nordigen to analyse Open Banking data. This allows customers to see analysis of their spending patterns across all their accounts, not just on their sync. card.
More categories
Budgeting features in other apps regularly feature around 20 spending categories and are not hugely accurate. Instead, sync. offers 32 main categories and 220 sub-categories, which is the most available in Europe.
This means users will get a much more clear and accurate view of their own spending habits. These meaningful insights allow users to quickly identify and change their spending patterns.
Nordigen worked with sync. for several months to develop transaction categorisation. The two companies researched user habits to improve the product, creating the most advanced budgeting categorisation tool in Europe.
Ricky Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of sync., said: “Our customers are excited to use our new budgeting features and we are excited to make them officially available to the public today. We knew that we wanted to stand out with our budgeting features and have worked with Nordigen for months to create the most varied categorisation tool in Europe. With 250+ categories, we hope our budgeting insights can genuinely help our customers and give them the best overview of their spending possible.”
Rolands Mesters, CEO and co-founder of Nordigen, said: “sync. is leveraging the open banking infrastructure to build a new unified banking experience. sync. embodies everything we love about open banking and we’re excited to support them as they scale across Europe.”
The startup plans to add more advanced budgeting features in the coming months which will allow users to: create sub-categories to better understand their spending; send budget insight notifications to help track spending, and help them save money by suggesting alternative beneficial products or services.
For more information about what Ricky and Rolands are doing, keep UpToDate with #DisruptionBanking, where we will continue to bring you the biggest stories in FinTech and Banking.
Author: Andy Samu
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