Sprive uses Pay by Bank to help homeowners pay off debt with rewards
Launched in 2021, Sprive lets their customers earn cash rewards through their everyday shopping to put towards paying off their mortgage early and achieving financial freedom.
Using the Sprive app, customers earn cashback rewards from over 1,000 well-known brands, with the money they earn going directly to mortgage repayments — all alongside useful insights on how their additional payments are helping them pay off their mortgage balances quicker.
The challenge: cost and speed in a high-frequency use case
For Sprive, the effectiveness of their product depends on two critical factors:
Commercial viability: To offer significant cashback, Sprive needs to keep payment costs low. Traditional card payments involve higher fees, which would directly reduce the amount of mortgage overpayments an app user could make.
Real-time requirements: Customers often use Sprive while in line at the checkout in a supermarket or department store. They need to buy a voucher and receive it instantly to pay for their goods. If the payment isn't real-time, the user experience fundamentally breaks.
This is what initially led Sprive to TrueLayer’s Pay by Bank solution, as it is both cost-effective and comes with real-time settlement. As Sprive CEO & Founder, Jinesh Vohra, put it: “Pay by Bank is really important to us because it maximises the amount of money that we can pass back onto our customers through cashback.”
What is Pay by Bank?
Pay by Bank is a payment method that lets customers pay for things directly from their bank account via their bank app, without the need for card networks. Find out more with our Pay by Bank guide
The solution
“As a tech start-up, it's really important that we focus on cost and unit economics and the customer experience. The great thing about Pay by Bank is it's real time payments. It's really important for our use case, because a lot of our customers are at checkout when they're buying their shopping vouchers.
Jinesh Vohra, CEO & Founder
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Sprive offers users the choice between Pay by Bank and mobile wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay. Because Pay by Bank is more economically viable, Sprive can offer higher cashback incentives to those who use it.
Through TrueLayer’s API, Sprive has built a payment experience that is:
Incentive-driven: Users receive more money back when they pay via bank transfer, which has overwhelmingly driven consumer behaviour.
Instant and reliable: Vouchers are issued immediately upon payment, satisfying the "at-the-till" use case.
Secure by design: By leveraging bank-level infrastructure, Sprive has virtually eliminated fraud on the platform, which is traditionally a major concern in the gift card space.
The results: Turning Pay by Bank into a daily habit
The partnership has seen overwhelming adoption of Pay by Bank as the preferred method for Sprive users:
Dominant share of checkout: 80% of Sprive users choose Pay by Bank over the likes of debit cards or Apple Pay, because they prefer the combination of real-time speed and higher cashback.
High conversion: Sprive maintains a 93% session conversion rate. This reliability ensures that even if a user has insufficient funds, they can quickly top up and complete the transaction.
Scalable growth: With someone shopping on the app every 5 seconds, Pay by Bank has become the norm for Sprive's community.
The future: a partnership that can scale
Sprive is a long-term partner of TrueLayer, with open banking — the fundamental technology powering Pay by Bank — being identified as a powerful way to back Sprive’s payments from the moment Jinesh and the team conceived of the app.
“We’ve been able to build and grow together. As we’ve become more successful, the TrueLayer partnership is going from strength to strength.
Jinesh Vohra, CEO & Founder
“We talked to several providers, but TrueLayer was very start-up friendly, with an API that was easy to integrate,” explains Jinesh. “We’ve been able to build and grow together. As we’ve become more successful, the TrueLayer partnership is going from strength to strength.”
While Sprive’s focus is currently on mortgages, there are over 44 million people in the UK having some form of household debt. As Jinesh puts it, “I see a world where we’re helping people with student loan debt, credit card debt and car-financing debt. This is just the beginning.”