Chatbot savings app Chip has crashed through the £1 million barrier in a crowdfunded effort to raise funds to apply for a banking licence.
Chip's proprietary AI connects to consumer current accounts and calculates how much customers can afford to save based on current spending levels. Saving limits are re-assessed every few days and spare cash transferred to a Chip savings account.
Since launch, the company claims to have processed £6.7m, analysed over 10 million transactions and had 25,000 people open an account. Chip has set its sights on serving 500,000 active users by 2020.
Having set a target for a £600,000 rise on Crowdcube, pledges now stand at £1.1 million. The crowdfunding piece form part of a larger £2.4 million round, which will enable Chip to launch a plug-in overdraft feature and begin the process of applying for a fully-fledged banking licence.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Cip founder and CEO Simon Rabin beliees the firm is in the vanguard of a new wave of challenger banking propositions applying new Open Banking data sharing rules to offer smarter savings and credit tools.
“In order to offer the customer a 10x better product experience, you can’t just resell them the existing market. All that makes you is a slightly better money supermarket!” he says. “We learnt this summer that customers love the smart credit functionality but we can’t make it viable within the existing wholesale funding market”.