Anna: Redefining SMB finance with open banking
Founded in 2018, ANNA Money is a UK based financial app that provides small business owners with an account and debit card, along with expense and tax management services.
Today, small business owners face a myriad of unique challenges - often managing things like business development, marketing, and product development themselves. On top of this, managing financial admin like expenses, taxes, and invoicing can be overwhelming. The ANNA team solves this problem by managing expenses, invoicing, and taxes in one simple app.
The challenge
ANNA realised many of their customers had multiple bank accounts and were struggling to get a complete overview of their expenses. This made things like processing invoices and calculating tax difficult. They also noticed that customers were using third-party providers to facilitate payments, which meant high transaction fees and long processing times, with payments taking hours or even days to settle.
For ANNA to continue providing a seamless customer experience, they knew they needed an easy, secure way for users to link their external bank accounts to the app. They also needed to find a way to enable their customers to receive instant, low-cost payments. To enable this, they turned to TrueLayer.
“A lot of customers were using intermediaries to accept payments, and being charged a commission — we wanted to eliminate this cost for our customers with a fast and secure alternative.
Irakli Agladze
Head of open banking
The solution
Partnering with TrueLayer, ANNA initially adopted the Data API, giving their customers the ability to connect their external bank accounts to the ANNA app. This gave their customers a complete view of their business expenses and enabled ANNA to build features such as automatic VAT calculations.
“The results we were able to achieve integrating the Data API were exciting. The stability of the service was important to us, helping us to focus on building a great product rather than worrying about the backend integration,” said Irakli.
Soon after, ANNA expanded the relationship to include the Payments API, enabling customers to quickly and securely receive money directly into their ANNA account using QR codes.
As a result, ANNA customers no longer need to use physical payment terminals, bank cards, or intermediaries for payments - significantly reducing transaction costs and speeding up transfers. This enables businesses to better manage their day-to-day cash flow.
Now, when an ANNA customer wants to be paid, they use the following process:
Open the Anna app and type “Get paid” into chat
Enter the amount they want to be paid
Ask their clients to scan the unique QR code Anna generates
Authorise the payment
“TrueLayer Payments quickly became one of the essential parts of our onboarding process. Now, business owners can get paid immediately using their ANNA app rather than going back to their desk, sending an invoice, and then chasing afterward.
Irakli Agladze
Head of open banking
The results
Because TrueLayer charges a low fixed-fee per transaction, regardless of the amount, ANNA is able to save on fees and pass these savings back to their customers. The partnership has resulted in a string of impressive results, including:
“It couldn’t have been easier. TrueLayer’s Customer service is amazing. Any questions were answered practically immediately, and our developers were able to integrate quickly and seamlessly.
Irakli Agladze,
Head of open banking