Back in the day, Brett King had this idea of starting a mobile-first bank. It was when Bank 2.0 took off, and I was one of the first investors. We ended up enjoying a day of brainstorming in an American park retreat, and developed the line “spend, save, and live smarter”, which is still there today.
The problem with Moven is that it was launched before the market was ready, and hence is the reason why you don’t read about it as the Nubank or Revolut of today. It was their predecessor, a bit like Blackberry preceded the iPhone.
The thing is that times move on and, today, if I were launching a mobile-first bank the start point would be intelligence. Intelligent Money: When Money Thinks For You – check http://www.moneythinks4u.com– delves deep into this area and specifically the question of intermediaries and infomediaries.
So you would build a bank based upon artificial intelligence, agentic AI and integrated open banking services. That’s a good start point but the real point is about how stupid people are with money.
People are stupid with money. We don’t have intelligence. We are irrational and do the things we want to do.
This is something that has been known for eternity and best summed up in a great book from 1841: “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay.
The book highlighted how we all follow the crowd and invest and spend based on crowd influence. The book examines the mass hysteria of bubbling markets that then crash, including the South Sea Bubble and Tulipmania. The core conclusion is that we have mass irrationality based upon greed, fear, and herd mentality. It feels we have some of that today with cryptocurrencies and fintech, but let’s not go there.
Instead, I was more prompted to think about how AI could help us “spend, save, and live smarter”, returning to where I started, and was drawn to this by an article by Primoz Karpe who chairs NLB dd, a bank in Slovenia. On Substack, Primoz writes:
“Most people want to be financially healthier – save more, spend better, invest smarter – but our actions often say otherwise.”
In his article, Primoz focuses upon cognitive dissonance – the situation where you know what you have to do but don’t do it. You want to be slim, but you eat too much; you want to be healthy, but smoke and drink too much; you want financial security but are driven by short-term gratification, peer influence, digital nudges, and emotion-driven responses.
As a result, many humans become fat, unhealthy and poor, but it’s purely the madness of the crowds we live with today. But then Primoz posits the question: could we use a mix of AI and human-instilled psychology in a way to do more than automate, basically to motivate?
This was a core premise of Moven. We wanted to use gamification to enoucrage better saving, spending and investing, and this is still a core part of my own thinking: can you change behaviours through intelligent analytics and make people financially healthy?
Read Primoz’s article for his thoughts, but another CEO friend piucked up on this: Coen Jonker, founder of Tyme Bank. Writing on LinkedIn, Coen asks: Why do people fail to do what they know is right? Answer: because the gap between intention and action is psychological, not informational and, right now, most banks only inform. But what if they could coach?
This is a critical thought process and if a challenger or neobank – there is a difference – could crack this nut, I reckon they would do really well. In fact, there are some that are getting close to cracking this nut. Take the example of Monzo with gambling.
Monzo was aware that many customers have an issue with compulsive and addictive gambling, and so they offer them the choice to block access to sites that are designated as gambling websites. This was intorudced in 2018 and, in 2024, blocked £9 million of funds from being wasted gambling.
How does it work?
Well, if you know you have this problem, you have an option to self-select a block on gambling on your account. Working with GamCare, a company dedicated to assist anyone with gambling addictions, Monzo has developed new features for account blocking of gambling sites and extended the maximum cool down period – the time between switching off the block and being able to gamble again – to an entire year.
The average self-imposed cool down has soared from three months to ten, with 41% of users opting for the maximum 12-month period. What’s more, 8,500 customers have chosen to use the ‘note for future you’ feature that allows them to write a personal note they’ll be shown if they are tempted to turn off the block and gamble again.
It just intrigues me how the mixture of AI, gamification, behavioural modification, self-selection of tools to encourage moves from things that could harm you to those that are good for you and more, could develop in banking and fintech services.
Maybe I’ll leave the final word to Primoz:
Let’s call this the AI Motivation Engine. Such [an] “engine” is a sort of AI software, an architecture based on human clinical psychology inputs and expertise. It takes in a mix of various signals from an individual’s context, predicts possible behaviours of an individual and tries to influence that behaviour subject to individual’s own key goals.
In a nutshell, it takes:
- Behavioural signals: from spending habits to sleep patterns
- Psycho-diagnostic data: based on micro-decisions and behavioural patterns in a digital world, helping you build macro profile over time
- Contextual inputs: location, mood, wearable data
And feeds all of them into a banking app environment as inputs, transforming them into real-time, hyper-personalized questions, serving them to you via chosen (digital) channel as outputs:
- “You said you wanted to save 500 EUR/month. Based on your spending so far, shall we move 100 EUR today to a short-term deposit?”
- “Your shopping expenses are going up, and you said you are thinking of buying a new apartment, so your credit card debt should be lower if you target to repay a mortgage instalment of 1.500 EUR/month which will allow you to buy an apartment worth 350.000 EUR. Want to temporarily freeze your card after midnight for this week?”
- “You’re spending less this week than usual—great progress! Shall we boost your savings goal by 5% this month?”
This isn’t sci-fi. It’s data science plus clinical psychology, deployed responsibly.