Nationwide announces investment in financial management platform empowering people with their money

The investment will mean Nationwide has a minority stake in the company and marks Britain’s biggest building society’s third deal as part of a £50 million Venturing Fund designed to create partnerships in which the Society and the start-ups share knowledge and expertise.

As part of the fund, Nationwide is making strategic investments in and partnering with early stage start-ups exploring innovative products and services that could provide real benefits for the Society’s members in the future.

Bristol-based Moneyhub is a financial management platform designed to empower individuals and enterprises. Using Open Banking and applying Artifical Intelligence with behavioural science, it delivers highly personalised actionable insights by consolidating accounts from multiple financial sources and multiple providers into one place – investments, savings, mortgages, current accounts to credit cards, loans and pensions. This removes the complexity of money management while the actionable nudges encourage positive behaviours to make money work harder.

Moneyhub also gives the user the ability to share their aggregated data with a trusted financial professional, such as a financial advisor or accountant.

This automates much of the fact find and provides ‘live’ insights into financial behaviour improving the advice and propositions the intermediary can offer, Moneyhub recently secured authorisation as a Payment Initiation Services Provider (PISP), which means within the platform users will be able to make payments and bank-to-bank transfers immediately alongside seeing all their financial information in one place. It offers an API gateway that is the largest ‘one-stop shop’ of personalised, permission based, financial data sources and ready-made nudges for businesses to utilise with their customers.

The Venturing Fund supports the Society’s recently announced multi-billion pound tech investment, which is designed to put the Society at the forefront of digital innovation. Technology is redefining how members want to be served and the Society is investing to stay ahead of expectations. The Society is investing a total of £4.1 billion in technology over the next five years.

Tony Prestedge, deputy chief executive at Nationwide Building Society, said: “It’s important that the Society invests for the future to ensure we remain at the forefront of innovation. Investing in start-ups like Moneyhub helps us identify, learn about and explore new capabilities and technologies that will help deliver our technology strategy both now and in the future.

“While many people will have heard of Open Banking and AI technology they may not be able to tell you much about how they are starting to impact their day to day lives, but we believe they are game changers for the financial services industry. In the future, Open Banking and AI will allow the Society to offer even more tailored and personalised services to our members. While we have years of experience in innovating and unlocking the benefits of new technology, we aren’t complacent. We know that by working together with start-ups we can learn from each other and ensure we are best placed to help our members get the most out of new technology in the future.”

Sam Seaton, CEO of Moneyhub said: “Nationwide shares our vision of enhancing the lifetime financial wellness of people, businesses and communities. Their investment proves the strength of our proposition and demonstrates the benefits at an individual and enterprise level of data aggregation, categorisation and insight led, actionable nudges. Moneyhub’s platform and API gateway, shows the potential of Open Banking, AI based data analysis and a customer first culture to power a step change in how financial services is delivered.”