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.
How do I make sense of it all?
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:
The staple 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.
The Recipes
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.
Find the right recipe for your business
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