Personal finance chatbot company Plum announces support for challenger banks Monzo and Starling Bank, through the use of Open Banking.
Plum has used Open Banking to integrate with challenger banks, making it the first chatbot to take advantage of the new directive and do so.
The integration has been made through a partnership with TrueLayer, which helps developers to access bank data to create financial apps, such as KYC, credit scoring and verification.
This integration works by TrueLayer lets consumers login to their Monzo or Starling accounts and then authorise third parties to access their data, without the need to share login details. Plum uses this to request access to the bank account data securely through an API.
Account information will only be made available once the customer chooses to use the chatbot service and to share their data. All information is read-only and end-to-end encrypted.
London-based Plum is a personal finance assistant app that uses AI technology to aid consumers with managing money. A user connects their bank account to the app and in turn get advice on saving, investing and bill comparison.
Its chatbot service, which is supported through Facebook Messenger, analyses daily spending and bills to calculate ways to save money, and will automatically transfer a small amount of money into its Plum savings account. Users also have the ability to invest, with seven options tailored to industry themes such as ethical investing.
Plum currently supports ‘most major banks’ and has 130,000 registered users in the UK, since it launched last year.
TrueLayer CEO and co-Founder Francesco Simoneschi, “We’re delighted to be able to help Plum expand its offering to Monzo and Starling Bank’s fast-growing customer bases. Every week brings an exciting new application of Open Banking. This is a testament to how the initiative should work – a disruptive new technology can quickly and securely become available to a bank’s customers. This is good for the startup, good for the bank and, most of all, good for consumers.”
The company is currently in the process of a crowdfunding campaign, having pulled in up to £954,204, surpassing its initial goal of £850,004. Last month, FinTech Global had reported the company had raised up to £579,945, following contributions from 284 investors. Its pre-money valuation is £8m.
Prior to this crowdfund, Plum raised £923,000 in another campaign in 2017, beating its initial goal of £700,000.
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