Three months in… Toucan, the money and mental health app
TL;DR
A lot has happened since January, when I went full time on Toucan, a new app helping people who need extra help managing their money from someone they trust.
We’ve partnered with Nationwide Building Society as part of its Open Banking for Good challenge and we’re working towards a pilot this summer with The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute.
This week we also met with MP Mims Davies, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Sport and Civil Society, to talk about Open Banking for Good and tech’s role as part of the Government’s Inclusive Economy Partnership.
This week at Toucan
If you’d have told me a few short months ago that in April an MP would be getting excited about what we’re building at Toucan, I’d have laughed.
But somehow that’s where I found myself this week, just one day after the announcement from Nationwide Building Society that we’re one of seven FinTech companies they’re partnering with on their Open Banking for Good challenge.
And as if that wasn’t enough, on Thursday I found myself in the middle of a roundtable at The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, a tiny fish surrounded by whales and sharks from industry, charities, regulators and Government.
How did we get here?
I’ve worked in early stage FinTech startups since 2012. I love seeing the changes in the financial services industry brought on by better, cheaper, faster products; from TransferWise, to Funding Circle, to Monzo.
I do, however, think there are areas where FinTech has to take more responsibility for the implications of the innovations we build. The way we spend, save and borrow money has changed so much in the last decade; inevitably there will be people who are left behind, or who start to feel overwhelmed.
A chance encounter at an event brought me into the path of Polly Mackenzie in 2016 when she and Martin Lewis were setting up The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. I was at Monzo at the time, and Polly came in and talked to us about their early research. I was quick to become a strong advocate of their work beyond Monzo, inviting them to speak at a meetup I used to organise.
Not long after that I went through a period of mental ill health myself and took a step back from startup life. As I regained my confidence and came back to work, I found that my perspective had changed.
I began to see that there were groups of people we weren’t designing for in established FinTech products. People who weren’t already confident budgeter; people who struggled with numbers; people who lost sleep because they couldn’t make ends meet.
I went to a hackathon in 2018 with a concept around simplifying down someone’s money management around alerts, aimed at the financially anxious, and won. From there I worked with others who helped me realise the potential of alerting a trusted family member, friend or carer, partly informed by Money and Mental Health’s Strength in Numbers report.
In November I put together an application for Nationwide’s Open Banking for Good challenge, thinking it was pretty unlikely I’d be one of the winners. After all, I was one person, a few months in, with some basic designs and hackathon-quality code.
But here we are.
Why we exist
Most money management apps come at spending and saving advice the same way. Money in, money out. Money saved, money spent. We’re all taught that one is good, one is bad, and if you can’t get a handle on your spending to save for your future, you’re ‘lazy’, ‘reckless’ or ‘stupid’.
But what if it wasn’t that simple? What if the way you were brought up, your past experiences and how you live your life today are all secretly affecting how you spend your money? What if the way you feel, whether that’s tired, stressed, guilty or angry, was working against you and getting in the way of your financial priorities?
We’re all at different stages, juggling our own day-to-day, yet banks treat us like we’re all on a one-way factory line of life. First, a credit card; then savings; then a mortgage; then investments. But that no longer works for everyone.
At Toucan we want to work with you, not against you. We’re building an app that helps people spend and save more in line with their priorities by building up a picture of their unique money personality.
People living with mental health problems have their own needs and priorities, and that’s who we’re focused on helping with our collaboration with The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute.
Notifications that spark timely conversations
We’re currently building the first version of the Toucan app around one key feature, helping people who want extra support with their money management from a trusted family member, friend or carer.
We’re building what banks, charities and regulators would call Third Party Notifications. These were recommended in The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute’s 2016 Strength in Numbers report, but have yet to be implemented in industry.
It’s very simple. The account holder, someone who feels they could benefit from extra support with money management, creates a Toucan account and connects to their bank account through Open Banking. We suggest some alerts based on their previous spending and bank balance data and allow them to opt-in to push notifications whenever a specific alert is triggered. It’s similar to how Monzo works with IFTTT, if you’re familiar with that.
If they want to, we then allow the account holder to nominate a Trusted Ally. Through research we’ve established that’s likely to be either a parent, spouse or sibling. The Trusted Ally must register their consent, but once that’s done, the account holder chooses which alerts they’d like to be sent automatically.
This feature is particularly useful for people living with bipolar disorder, where manic episodes can induce someone to overspend without awareness about the long term consequences. By receiving an alert when their loved one goes over a spending or balance limit, the Trusted Ally can intervene and start a timely conversation about mental health and money management.
As we heard from one of our research participants:
“I sometimes go through waves of buying stuff to try and make myself feel better.
If I was spending an unusual amount, it would be useful for someone to know this and maybe have a conversation with me about it.”
Protecting people from financial abuse
By building automatic notifications that can be sent to a trusted third party we want to provide an alternative to the much riskier way that people are already getting support — sharing online banking usernames and passwords.
Our recent research with Money and Mental Health has shown that of people living with mental health problems who currently get support with money management, 60% share their PIN number and debit card with their carer, and 40% share their online banking username and password.
These risky workarounds leave people who are already vulnerable open to financial abuse, where a carer can steal undetected, or coercion, where someone takes full control of a bank account in order to control their victim.
We believe it’s important to provide people with the option to set up Third Party Notifications to avoid these risky workarounds. Using Open Banking is one way that we can build this solution without having to rely on a bank to move first.
What’s next
We’re working towards a pilot with The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute over the summer, but that’s not all we have in the pipeline.
We’ve conducted our own first hand research study over the last two months, interviewing over 20 people with financial anxiety in London and Birmingham about their habits, attitudes and the products they use. Our findings have helped us make important decisions about what we need to build next. We’ll tell you more about that over the next few months.
We’re already talking to big names about future partnerships, too. Can’t say too much at the moment, but stay tuned for announcements later this year.
In a couple of weeks we’ll have a new website to launch, and we’ll also be ready to start talking about the rest of the Toucan team. I’m now surrounded by a developer, designer, researcher and behavioural psychologist, all of whom need introducing.
The office is starting to look pretty crowded, so we’ll be looking for more space soon, too.
If you’d like to stay up-to-date with all that’s going on with us at Toucan, join our mailing list at usetoucan.com. We won’t spam you — you’ll get updates when we have something to say that we think you’ll find interesting.
Want to collaborate? Talk to me about partnerships or about joining the team by emailing bailey@usetoucan.com. I’d also love to hear from early stage investors; we’ll be raising some money in the coming months to top up our grant funding from Open Banking for Good.
