SavedPlus Ties Savings Habits to Payments Habits

SavedPlus has launched a platform that encourages consumers to save a small amount of money every time they make a payment.

By setting an automatic transfer tied to the amount of each purchase, SavedPlus “allows you to save money without budgeting and without thinking about it at all,” says Nikita Brodskiy, CEO of SavedPlus, during FinovateFall in New York City on Sept. 10.

Consumers request that SavedPlus transfer a percentage of their transaction amount via Automated Clearing House into another account, such as a savings or retirement account. Since launching the platform in May, the company has signed up about 500 active users, and on average these users save $208 a month, most with an average percentage per transaction of 7%, says Brodskiy.

SavedPlus takes cues from personal finance management software, which allows consumers to budget and save money by providing insight into how much they earn and spend each month.

Consumers “set up a permanent stream every day,” Brodskiy says. “We allow consumers to save a little, save often and save automatically.”

The company is targeting the 15 million Americans who make enough money to live comfortably but feel that they could save more, Brodskiy says.

SavedPlus is focusing on the U.S. currently, and plans to move into the U.K. and Australia with the help of the bank technology vendor Yodlee.

SavedPlus also allows consumers to donate funds to charitable organizations. For example, SavedPlus works with United Way Silicon Valley and sees several consumers send 1% of their transactions to the charity, says Brodskiy.

SavedPlus charges its merchant partners 1.5% on transactions, which is about half a percent lower than traditional processing fees, he says.

The SavedPlus platform resembles products from startups JarStar and Coinvenience. Based in the U.K., JarStar allows the change consumers receive after paying for an item with cash to be deposited into a savings account by the cashier. Coinvenience, still a prototype, does the same for the U.S. market.

The SavedPlus platform also compares to several large banks' savings tools, including Bank of America’s Keep the Change program and Wells Fargo’s debit-related Way2Save product.

But SavedPlus is more flexible since consumers can set whatever percent they want to save and there’s no cap on the amount a consumer can transfer for each transaction, says Brodskiy.