Moneyhub is an Open Finance data, intelligence and payments platform.  Their APIs and white-label solutions power businesses – both from within and from outside of financial services. Providing data connections and intelligence, they also initiate Open Banking payments to enable hyper-personalised experiences that drive customer engagement. Their vision is to enhance the lifetime financial wellness of people, their communities and their businesses.

We spoke to Vaughan Jenkins, Director of Business Development at Moneyhub to find out more about this exciting fintech.

How would you describe Moneyhub?

We like to describe ourselves as an Open Finance platform. The organisation began in providing holistic financial planning services, looking beyond banking into every aspect of a person’s financial life and future. Trying to bring that into a single, aggregated place, where you could then provide guidance as to what the next best action for an individual was.

It is fair to say that Moneyhub was an absolute pioneer in that area and was talking about Open Banking before it was even a thing. The CTO at Moneyhub was involved in the writing of the Open Banking standards. However, we tend not to think of ourselves as a pure Open Banking organisation, our primary focus is more around the insights and the intelligence that comes from the aggregation.

Our CTO, Dave Tonge, also co-founded FDATA, the global body promoting Open Finance standards.  Our CEO, Sam Seaton is on the Pension Dashboard Steering Group and we are part of TISA’s Open Savings and Investments initiative underscoring our proactive thought leadership in this space.

What has contributed to Moneyhub’s success?

The very early success of Moneyhub came from financial wellbeing taking off in the UK and becoming a global phenomenon, with both government led, and employer led interest.

There was a realisation for employers that stress in the workplace undermined productivity. So apart from having a philanthropic view of looking after employees, there was a dawning realisation that there was a genuine return on investment for improving the financial wellbeing of employees. As a lot of stress was being driven from money worries.

By being able to show the ROI associated with improved financial wellbeing, our clients which were big employee benefit consultants like Aon and Mercer, now had the technology to bring all of those finances into one place with the endorsement and infinity of the employer and do that at scale reaching not hundreds but millions of potential employees.

We are still on that journey with the big employee benefit consultants, the pension providers, those that have got access to workforces, it is a really important area for us.

What is next for improving employee financial wellbeing?

Firms are now looking to splice finance data with other types of data such as health data, to have an even clearer understanding as to what the next best actions are going to be. Others are looking at how to help employees create a savings capacity.

One of the things we have been doing is looking at marketplaces, which are closely tied to what we can do in Open Finance. An example is, we know where people spend their money, so we take expenditure analysis, and we can then ensure that any retail offers that are made are absolutely pertinent to that individual.

With the employee benefit consultants Aon, those targeted highly personalised offers are generating savings on average of about £70 per month. So, without any laborious financial education or changes in attitude or behaviour you are immediately creating a savings capacity, a buffer for an individual to then sweep that money over to paying off debt or into a pension or ISA. That is a very practical way of using the benefits of incremental expenditure analysis with targeted very relevant offers for individuals.

What do you think are the main benefits Open Finance can bring?

I think one of the reasons that we talk about Open Finance so much is that the value dividend to consumers is potentially so great. The real benefits therefore in Open Finance come from trying to redress the balance between consumer insight and the power of the Financial Services sector to drive better deals, more appropriate products and services to ensure that suitability of those products is also fit for purpose in the long term.

The consumer can get an enormously better deal, ultimately that is one of the great outcomes Open Finance can provide. There are obviously lots of obstacles to that but also a lot of remedies that still need to be put in place.

Open Banking was the first wave, pensions dashboard is the next wave, and then beyond that there are other product areas and industry sectors that we can bring in.

All of it is aimed at putting the information at the fingertips of consumers, so that they have more understanding of the offers available to them and to ensure that consumers are not preyed upon by inertia and poorer deals from being in an old product. If we can surface what is available to people, what they could be doing in a much more dynamic and easy way through apps, it will level the imbalance and asymmetry of information between the consumer and industry.

That is not entirely to the disadvantage of the industry either because if you’ve got more informed customers, you’re probably much less likely to find yourself being on the wrong end of scandals and PPI type exercises going forward in the future because people know what they bought and why they bought it, why it was suitable and probably there will be less redress to worry about if you’ve got a more informed customer.

Final thoughts:

Moneyhub is a clear Open Finance pioneer.

Its customer facing financial management tool, continues to receive awards, whilst its integration platform continues to expand to new areas, covering pensions, investments, loans, mortgages, savings, property values, and, of course, bank accounts and credit cards.

On top of this, Moneyhub has also developed a significant payments capability, as the first Open Banking service to offer PISP payments and transfers between accounts.

The pivot towards data integrations and payments not only provides a healthy, continuous revenue stream that B2C propositions seldom deliver, but it also sets the foundations for the development of more capabilities, and more partnerships, over time.

The challenge, which Moneyhub seems to be balancing well to date, will be in how the organisation continues to excel across each of these areas as one of the most integral facets of the Open Finance ecosystem.

Eventually PFM tools will be commoditised and payments may become an increasingly competitive arena. There may be value in doubling down on data – both in terms of the breadth and depth of integrations that can be developed, and in the insights that can be derived from data to create new use cases across FS and in other, parallel industries.

Read our report “Uncovering the true potential of Open Finance” for more insights on the solutions and products being developed across the industry today!

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