Nutmeg: improving investor experience with open banking

Founded in 2011, Nutmeg is the digital wealth manager that’s enabling a nation of investors.

Nutmeg is the UK’s first and largest digital wealth manager, making high-quality investment and wealth management a clear and straightforward experience for more than 100,000 customers.

As a business that is always looking for innovative ways to enhance the client experience, Nutmeg wanted to improve the payments process to enable investors to get their money to market faster, while increasing operational efficiency. Nutmeg turned to TrueLayer for an open banking payment solution that enabled its investors to fund their accounts seamlessly

The challenge

Before partnering with TrueLayer via the Payments API, most of Nutmeg’s payments came via debit cards. Aside from the obvious cost, card payments could take several days to arrive, delaying funds reaching the market. 

A small proportion of payments came via bank transfer. While this was cost-effective, manual bank transfers don’t share much metadata, making reconciliation difficult. Deposits would land in Nutmeg’s accounts and need to be allocated, which brought its own operational costs. “Some users make mistakes, meaning our operations team were met with errors and missing reference numbers, which leads to a delay,” said Charlie.

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When customers are ready to invest, being in the market as soon as possible matters to the customers experience.

Charlie Masters

Product Manager

The solution

Charlie sought a solution that would deliver faster payments for customers, without severe operational costs for Nutmeg. He was interested in open banking and decided to implement TrueLayer’s Payments API.

“The payment initiation functionality provides relevant and helpful metadata to an initiator, passing through strong authentication, and then arriving with Nutmeg the same business day - which increases the likelihood of the customer hitting the next trading cycle”, Charlie explained.

By using the Payments API, Nutmeg was able to create a slicker, faster process on iOS, Android and in-browser, giving customers a better experience and the ability to get their money to market faster.

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Open banking with TrueLayer allows us to pass payment details to the user’s bank via a third-party payment initiator. This only requires the user to login to their bank and confirm the payment to their Nutmeg account.

Charlie Masters

Product Manager

The results

After trying out open banking payments, Nutmeg users found the experience preferable to other options and started to vote with their feet. “Before launching, bank transfers accounted for a tiny proportion of overall payments,” Charlie explained. 

The TrueLayer solution has now taken manual bank transfer’s place in the app. “Since launching, payments via open banking are now around a quarter of all payments and growing. It’s a better payment experience for our users – and more of our users are now choosing it.”