The Challenge

Snoop is a fintech start-up, established in spring of 2019 by a team of former senior managers at Virgin Money. Drawing on their heritage of building consumer champion brands and solutions, as well as the opportunities fostered by Open Banking, the co-founding group wanted to create an application which would deliver personalised advice to users across all of their spending – including direct debits and payment accounts.

Snoop enables users to connect all of their bank accounts, credit cards and payment cards to a single cloud-based platform, and then uses artificial intelligence to analyse their spending and transaction patterns. The powerful application then automatically identifies ways for users to ‘spend smarter, save smarter, live smarter’, using hyper-personalisation to provide them with a feed of ‘snoops’. These could include advice that a particular recurring payment is fluctuating, providing suggestions for recommended product switching, and tips to make a consumers money go further.

Whilst Snoop is not a bank, it does interface with systems that handle customers’ financial information and is regulated by the FCA and Open Banking regimes. As such, enterprise-grade cybersecurity services and a robust approach to identifying and managing cyber risk and compliance was critical from the outset. Partnering with third-party specialists who could provide this expertise from the beginning was vital.