TrueLayer and ANNA: making finance easy for small businesses

Ever since we heard about the company with the debit card that meows when you use it, we’ve been paying close attention to ANNA. And since many of us regularly see ANNA’s catchy ads on London buses on our way into work each day, we’re really excited to be working with them — and thrilled that they use our platform to the fullest, from data access to payments initiation!

So what is ANNA? And why do they use TrueLayer? We asked Irakli Agladze, ANNA’s Head of Open Banking, to put it in his own words:

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"ANNA is a business current account and a debit card for small businesses and sole traders. Many of our users either use personal accounts for their business expenses or have a business account with a high street bank, so it’s crucial for us to show the bigger picture."

Irakli Agladze,

Head of Open Banking

One reason we at TrueLayer are so excited about Open Banking is that it gives individuals and businesses more options to fit their needs. With ANNA, not only do small businesses and sole traders get a slick account and a fun card to manage their expenses, they can pull in their other accounts to have a view of all their business costs in one place.

Everything ANNA does, they do quickly — it’s possible to set up an account with them in less than three minutes, and their support times are rapid (on their website they get back to you within 10 minutes on the ANNA app or they’ll refund you that month’s £11 subscription!) That’s no different when they’re implementing a new feature — like with all of our clients, we knew we had to make it quick for them to integrate TrueLayer, so that we could help foster speedy development.

As Irakli put it:

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"As a startup ourselves, we’re moving very fast with product development, and it’s crucial for us that our partners can support that speed. That’s why we are so happy to work with TrueLayer: both the business and technical support from their side helps us immediately, and we don’t have to worry about slowing down our pace."

Most recently, ANNA has been using our payments initiation service, allowing their users to quickly and securely top up their ANNA accounts using Open Banking. It’s faster than doing a manual transfer and offers much lower fees than using a debit card, allowing ANNA to keep costs low for their users.

They were able to implement the feature really quickly, and Irakli told us it was a straightforward process for them:

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"One of the most critical recent features for my team was enabling our users to top up their accounts in ANNA from their existing bank accounts via TrueLayer’s PIS. I’m happy to say that together we managed to release this feature in a couple of weeks. Everything was straightforward to set up; the documentation was full and clear — nothing delayed us at all."

We’ve really enjoyed working with ANNA so far, and have learned a lot from their great design, user focus, and quick pace. We’re thrilled that we can be part of their success so far and can’t wait to see what they come up with next!