In conversation with tickr: how open banking is supporting ethical investing

tickr is an app that makes it easy to invest in companies that are solving social and environmental problems, as well as making a profit. We spoke to Product & Growth Manager Toby Butterworth to find out how open banking is driving value for tickr and its customers.

tickr is known as an ‘impact investment’ platform. What does that mean?

We’ve made a platform for people who are new to investing and who want to make a positive impact on the world through their investments, for example, by offsetting their carbon footprint.

How do you use TrueLayer’s APIs?

We use TrueLayer’s Data API to power our spare change roundup feature, which is used by a third of our users. We use the API to fetch transactions of the past week and calculate a user’s spare change. Then, on a weekly basis, we collect a payment for that amount and invest it for the user.

What benefits have you seen so far?

For our users to get the most value out of tickr they need to add money regularly. Regular contributions are strongly correlated with retention. Our data shows that users with roundups enabled are 20–25% more likely to use our platform over a 90 day period.

The roundups feature encourages regular investment behaviour – it’s more motivating for our customers than monthly top ups since it happens every week. Our customers also tell us that it makes saving more fun and affordable. It also makes regular investing more accessible to those who, for example, might not have their budgeting in check at the beginning of the month.

Before launch, it was a much-requested feature, particularly among our millennial users.

What are your plans for open banking going forward?

We have ambitions to integrate much more deeply with TrueLayer, including looking at how we can power our onboarding and sign-up flow through open banking, and our payment collections – one-off and, in time, variable recurring payments (VRP) too.

We’re also interested to see rich granular data coming from TrueLayer’s Data API and the transaction classifications within their new Insights API. One clear use case for us here is to identify our customers’ recurring bills and be able to say ‘that’s a broadband bill’ for example. We’re also looking closely at TrueLayer’s income and spend estimation features, these could enable us to recommend the right amount for our customers to save going forward.

We’re really excited about the potential of open banking across our entire platform. We see some strong use cases for both payments and data, which we’ll be investigating and rolling out over the coming months.

At TrueLayer we’re proud supporters of businesses who are transforming the world of finance. With our simple APIs, we help businesses like tickr to integrate financial services into any application or website, anywhere in the world.

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