Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

Plum (www.withplum.com), the UK’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered Facebook chatbot which allows consumers to start saving and investing without any effort, today announces its partnership with RateSetter, one of the UK’s largest peer-to-peer investing platforms.

Plum’s smart algorithm understands spending patterns, identifies income and bills and creates a unique profile for each one of its users. It calculates a small amount of money to save or invest and automatically transfers it to an individual’s Plum account every few days to put that money to work.

Users talk with Plum on Facebook Messenger, just like they would a friend, and can ask it to put away more money or to transfer money from their savings and investment account back to their current account.

Currently, according to Moneyfacts, the average rate on easy-access accounts is 0.15% with the biggest nine banks averaging 0.04%. Plum realises that there is the need for a fresh approach to earning returns. Plum’s partnership with RateSetter means that people who are comfortable putting capital at risk can use the peer-to-peer lending platform to earn a higher rate of interest – the average return earned by RateSetter investors to date is 4.7%.

Victor Trokoudes, co-founder at Plum, comments:

“A quarter of people in Britain don’t save according to recent figures from ING. One reason for this is because people don’t see instant and significant benefits from high street banks – these savings accounts as we know them are dead and rendered useless by many consumers, particularly millennials.”

“Our aim is to enable every person in the UK to put money aside, whether that’s just enough for a rainy day, or for something substantial like a house deposit. We know that a lot of people feel either that they cannot commit to saving a specific amount per month, or are not motivated to save – so our ambition is to use technology to help them save with as little effort as possible.”

Ceri Williams, Head of Investor Operations at RateSetter, comments:

“We all know that we should be putting money away for the future, but even with the best intentions, sometimes we just don’t get round to it. Plum makes it easy for people to gradually build up a pot of money for the future, and we’re happy to give people who are prepared to take on some risk the option to earn a higher rate of interest. We’re keen to work with anyone who is changing people’s investing habits for the better and offering the nation a new and more fruitful way of making their money work for them.”

Plum is the brainchild of Victor Trokoudes and Alex Michael, who were part of the early teams at TransferWise and Tictail respectively. Plum is backed by a number of successful entrepreneurs including one of the founders of One Fine Stay and a 500 start-ups microfund. For more about how this works, visit https://withplum.com/.

*A report by Deloitte in September 2015 found that UK savings gap will reach £350 billion by 2050.