Building the world’s first savings account for travel: Week 39

Oliver Mitchell

Published in

Moneycado

4 min readAug 13, 2018

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What we did

Product Development

We have struggled to conclude the bank account integration with Teller this week. Mark is running up against the same authentication error while trying to establish a connection, despite having a unit test producing the same signature request as in Teller’s API documentation. In short, a brick wall!

This difficulty may turn into an opportunity. In researching alternatives, we’ve found that both Monzo and Starling Bank allow developers to create applications for a small, white-listed group of accounts without needing to hold a regulatory licence. This is all we need for a prototype application, so we’re considering simply building Moneycado as an interface layer over a Monzo ‘Pot’ or Starling ‘Goal’ in the first instance.

In turn, I’ve begun to explore our regulatory options. On Monday I spoke with Gilbert and Ryan from Fintech Compliance. They immediately impressed me with their practical knowledge of the current regulatory landscape. Similar products to Moneycado have sought an e-money licence. Here are my thoughts:

On Thursday I spoke with Seb and Francesca from Smarter Human, a RegTech firm building a Slackbot for open banking compliance. We white-boarded Moneycado’s information and payment flows and came to an important conclusion: we may need AISP and PISP licences in order to connect and send instructions to other banks. This exploratory work is frustrating (and I’ve never enjoyed talking compliance), but I’m conscious that any misstep here can seriously delay our path to market.

Marketing

This week we released the Trip Cost Calculator to the world. Matt setup and run our first paid Facebook campaign, testing which of the following three groups are most likely to respond to the below ad.

Control group (London 20yo — 50yo);
Tech early adopters; or
Frequent travellers + travel aficionados .

We’re yet to review the results, I’ll be sharing in next week’s blog post.

We spent Friday morning shooting ‘Founder Stories’, short cuts to common questions we get asked. Matt got overly excited about the camera settings (‘bro, the light is perfect now!’) and we ended up with some great tape to use on social media. In such an early stage of development, our community is backing us as much as they are interested in our product. We think it’s essential to bring them along on the journey with us.

We also had two superb contributions from our network this week:

On Thursday we had Reine, the marketing guru formerly from World Travel and Tourism Council and the Jordan Tourism Board, into the office to give us advice on conducting social media in the travel space. She came prepared with a notebook full of interesting angles and potential introductions, and so many good stories that we invited her to feature in our next #TravelTuesday Meetup!
Matt has been working with Kayla from GoAbroad on a partnership where we would mutually promote each other’s product in our marketing. Travel operator partnerships are core to our proposition, and Kayla has been a delight to work with so far.

The Big Picture

On Thursday night we had our first team dinner, a small thank you for the contribution that Mark, George and Oliver have made already with our product. Matt and I were reflecting on it the following morning, and one thing we both loved was the liberal use of the collective pronoun; conversations always started ‘when we do X’ and ‘we should think of Y’. These first shoots of team cohesion are a real joy.