Snoop

Hyper-personalised money management

Innovation presentation

Introduction

Powered by open banking, Snoop is an award-winning consumer focused business that helps people spend, save and live smarter.

Snoop was founded by a group of highly experienced former Virgin Money executives, led by the bank’s former CEO, Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia.

We shared a belief that creating an open banking-based proposition would enable us to deliver profoundly better outcomes for consumers.

Snoop has a big ambition - to make everyone better off. As well as giving customers a complete view of their finances, Snoop uses secure open banking technology to provide data-driven, personalised insights to help consumers save money.

Every customer gets a completely unique experience tailored based on their open banking data. Hyper-personalisation and the ability to connect people with relevant and personalised money insights (at exactly the right time) is Snoop’s USP and enables the app to be relevant, practical and useful in the everyday lives of people.

By helping customers to switch to better deals across their household finances, at exactly the right time, Snoop can help people line their own pockets, not boost the profits of big business.

We estimate that the average UK household could save £1,500 per year and Snoop has been downloaded 300k times since April 2020.

We’re ultimately aiming to make everyone better off by making their financial data work for them and transforming traditional services like retail banking, money management and price comparison into a more intelligent and personalised service.

……………………………..

Problem Snoop aims to solve

Research shows that inertia costs consumers £12 billion per year – known as the loyalty penalty. To put this into context, 8/10 consumers end up overpaying for at least one essential service, for example on their energy, mobile, mortgage, insurance, or broadband bills.

To combat this, as well as giving consumers a complete view of their finances through secure open banking technology, Snoop provides data-driven, personalised insights (‘Snoops’) to help customers save money - both on their bills and their overall spending. This gives customers a unique feed of money-saving ideas, 100% personalised based on an individual’s banking data.

By helping customers to switch to better deals across their household finances, at exactly the right time, Snoop can help people line their own pockets, not boost the profits of big business.

For too long, the big banks have controlled the most detailed and personal data of consumers’ lives. This is part of why we are so unavoidably reliant on them.

Challenger banks have made limited headway in providing customers with alternative products that challenge the traditional providers at scale. As a result, the banking system lacks innovation and price tension - just at a time when we all need more financial support in our lives.

As a result, Snoop is doing what banks should always have been doing. Delivering connected, helpful, personal experiences that genuinely make customers better off.

Using open banking – and eventually open finance – to help people make the most of their data (and by transforming traditional services like retail banking, money management and price comparison) we can help make everyone better off, change the way people think about their money, and define the future of financial services.

……………………………..

The Platform

In creating Snoop, we’ve adopted a cloud-first technology strategy, with most of the platform bespoke built by the Snoop team, hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud and complemented by leading software-as-a-service platforms.

All Snoop's data handling algorithms and rules are unique to Snoop, created internally by our engineers and data scientists.

We use AI and machine learning to create customer value through relevance and personalisation, prediction and forecasting, trends and actionable insight. For example - our recommendation engine analyses millions of banking transactions and constantly recommends personalised “snoops” to each customer, every day; our balance forecasting model guides customers successfully towards their next payday; and our recurring payments analyser checks on customers regular subscriptions and bills to ensure “stealth” increases are clear and obvious.

All Snoop’s success to date has been delivered through a hugely resilient platform with zero unplanned downtime in the past 12 months.

……………………………..

Examples of Snoop in action

We analyse all spending – not just household bills. Examples of some of the innovative uses of open banking data to help deliver customer benefit that we've delivered in the past 3 months includes the following:

1) Price Hike Snoop

In April 2021, many broadband and mobile providers increased prices, as did Netflix, Disney+, the TV licence and UK councils (through increased council tax payments). We scanned all our customers' transactions - identifying where they would face a price hike - and if they did, how much it would cost (e.g. we worked out which Council Tax area they were in and joined this data with local Council data to confirm their increase). In doing this, we prepared a personalised review for each customer identifying (only where relevant) exactly how much extra they'd be paying through each of these changes over the next 12 months. This allowed customers to see the total impact of these individual changes so they could budget for this. In addition, we identified ways to save money (e.g. apply for council tax rebates, switch Netflix tiers) and provided these. This was massively popular with our customers as no-one else allowed them to see the combined effect of each of these individual changes.

2) Current Account Switching Snoop

The UK current account market is characterised by offers to tempt customers to switch current account. However, one account - Santander 123 - pays cashback rewards on an ongoing basis based on a customer's spending on household bills. We analysed each element of our customers' finances to work out if they would be better off switching for a one-off upfront bonus, or a longer-term Santander reward. No digital money platform available today is using Open Banking data in this way to help customers make the right financial choices.

3) 'Save where you spend' Snoop

In this situation, we analysed the 25 shops and retailers where our customers spent the most - and then identified all the different ways to save money at those retailers. We prepared a Snoop for each customer highlighting how much they paid at each of the merchants, and then giving them smart ways to save money. This combination of analytics based on Open Banking data with journalistic money-saving advice is unique in the market. Once again, this was hugely popular with our customers.

4) £75k saving

An example to illustrate the power of the app: Snoop was able to pinpoint that some people in the Milton Keynes area might have been paying over the odds for their water bills. The app prompted users to check to see if they were paying for ‘surface water drainage’ – rainfall that falls on a property and drains away into public sewers. If you are being charged, but rainwater does not drain from your property into a public sewer, you may be entitled to a surface water drainage rebate. Based on this insight a customer successfully claimed £230 from Anglian Water. He shared the insight with his neighbours and soon realised the rest of his neighbours on his Housing Estate had been overcharged. After several more successful individual claims, Anglian Water initially agreed to look at a group claim for all 378 properties on the development. The result, Snoop helped one community get a £75,000 rebate.

……………………………..

Customer Feedback

Most rewarding has been the thousands of positive reviews we’ve received in the App Store and Google Play – gathering a 4.8* and 4.5* rating, respectively. Part of customer’s love for our product is the exceptional service our small Operations team provide to customers using the app. Nothing is too much trouble in making sure that customers get the experience they want from the product. To-date, we’ve handled well over 12,000 inbound customer enquiries – and we continually get strong feedback.

……………………………..

What’s next

In July 2021 we announced Snoop’s Series A with Paulson & Co investing £15 million in the Snoop proposition, team and ambition. We are delighted that they, like us, recognise open banking as a major growth opportunity within the financial sector.

Investment from a global financial heavyweight is a massive vote of confidence. The funding will be used to continue to scale rapidly, fund product and distribution development and extension, as well as aid international expansion. It will also play a key part in realising our ambition for the business to become a global leader, synonymous with open banking and smart money management.

Thank you for taking the time to consider this submission.

Uniqueness of the project

What really makes Snoop standout from other solutions for customers is that every Snooper gets a unique experience tailored to them based on their open banking data.

Also, by combining the best of the neo-banks, money management, price comparison websites and switching services into one app – we believe we are delivering something uniquely useful and better for consumers.