Initial situation
- in-house bunq team ensuring enhancement of merchant’s logo database
- database of approximately 300 logos with no localisation or any further information
- basic rule-based categorisation of payments into manually created sub-accounts
About bunq
A European challenger bank based in Amsterdam and one of the world’s first mobile-only banks. From the start in 2015, bunq has risen quickly in popularity, allowing its customers to: set up bank accounts, make payments, split checks, and transfer funds to friends all from a single mobile app. Since then, bunq expanded to all EU countries.
The goal
Focus on customer experience and speed-up innovation
- Implement high performing simple to integrate solution with minimum intervention to internal systems
- Cut the go-to-market time of new features involving data insights
- Provide higher relevance for clients by increasing recognition rate of TX
- Reduce costs and keep focus on product development not data cleansing
- Teach customers sustainable spending habits with CO2 footprint tracker
The challenger bank was looking to extend its product offering with a digital service that helps customers get a better overview of their day-to-day spending
50% of mobile banking app users claim a need for a better overview of their finances. 25% admitted having a hard time controlling their spending.
“People are looking for a clear idea of what they spent and where. It’s so much easier for people to understand their spending habits when they can visually see what’s happening. While looking for a solution to this, we found Tapix. They’ve helped us give people a much better insight into their spending, and we’ve saved a tonne of time in the process. Using Tapix gave us a really high-quality product, in a very short period of time.”
Tom Bilske | Product owner at bunq
Solution
Step 1 – provide basic transparency to payments
Clean & visual payments overview and transaction detail
At first, in 2018, bunq implemented Tapix's payment data enrichment resulting in clear transaction detail overview with accurate merchant name, logo, GPS, location and categorisation.
In addition to that, bunq implemented transfer enrichment based on Tapix's product portfolio extension
Step 2 – overview of the spending and budgets
Data driven spending insights
At the end of 2019 bunq launched the Insights section under the "Me" tab.
bunq utilizes Tapix data also to "bulk" categorise all outgoing payments automatically. By knowing where the money is spent and having the ability to set saving goals, clients can save up to 10% without any effort.
Step 3 – deep dive into specific use cases: subscription overview
Overview of recurring payments
In 2020 bunq introduced a new "My subscription" tab in the budgeting overview
This resulted in providing clients with one less step to achieve more saving goals.
Step 4 – promoting sustainability with EcoTrack
Building healthy spending habits with CO2 footprint categorisation
Sustainability plays key role in bunq’s approach to finance. Tapix tailored it's categorisation with eco-friendly/sustainable transaction tags to fuel greener spendings.
Now, users can also gain valuable insights into the CO2footprint of their purchases through carbon calculations Tapix added withEcoTrack, going beyond the regular MCC. The aim is to enable users to make educated choices while conducting day-to-day transactions, ensuring that every purchase aligns with their sustainability goals.
Community building tip: bunq is bringing the community together by showing hot spots visited by other bunqers.
Integration
Bunq chose to integrate Tapix API in a cloud hosted version. In comparison to on premise version integration effort is minimum with no impact on infrastructure and other internal systems.
Enhanced data are stored within infrastructure of the bank where it can be accessed by all systems and applications without further interaction with Dateio.
While stored in the bank, Tapix API is automatically able to update the data and keep them up to date, increase data quality, or even allow new use cases requiring changes in data.
GDPR ready
No clients’ personal data are shared during data enrichment process, so no additional consent is required.
Dateio is ISO 27 000 certified and GDPR compliant.
Results
90% - transactions are categorised
86% - transactions have clean merchant name
52% - localisation rate
17k – logo database
208k - recognised merchants in use
99.9%+ - data accuracy
- The initial database of 300 merchants with logos was extended to 208 000 merchants with 17 000+ logos
- Enhancement of year back historical transactions was provided to include meaningful data right from the start
- Tapix’s global coverage is keeping up the pace with bunq as they continue to scale up and expand to new markets
As an entirely mobile bank, the pressures of innovating to match expectations is something that we thrive under. The mobile revolution has made a massive impact on society both in the way we communicate but also the rate at which we want our needs to be met. This is something that our partners at Dateio clearly agree on.
Ali Niknam | Founder & CEO at bunq
