Spiir is expanding its personal finance app to the UK, Poland, Netherlands, Portugal, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria and Spain in one major strategic move to make it easier for people to manage their money and empower them to boost their financial awareness.
Since Spiir was founded back in 2011, the Danish fintech company has been on a mission to improve the financial status of its over 400,000 users in the Nordic countries. Now, they are focusing on Europe thanks to the innovative opportunities that the world of open banking provides.
“We are extremely proud and excited to launch this massive scaleup that can impact the life and day-to-day financial well-being of people in so many different countries,” says Martin Junker, Product Lead at Spiir.
“Essentially, we want to change the way people feel about their finances. From our daily spending to the dreams we hold for our future. Money affects us all. But despite the significant role that money plays in our life, we often tend to think of budgeting and money management in an outdated way of old school and complicated budgets. We are here to show people that managing your money can be fun. And that personal finance is a question about habits and not just numbers.”
Besides providing its users with a financial overview across banks and multiple accounts, Spiir has built features that focus on engaging its users to reflect on their financial choices. “We have created a number of features designed to boost the users’ financial awareness. Like Challenges, a feature that motivates the user to cut down on their expenses on groceries, takeaway or to-go coffee. We also have our quiz feature that asks our user to guess how much money they spent on a specific category last month. These are features that actively contribute to helping the user think about their spending habits and how it impacts their life,” explains Martin Junker.
Spiir uses their own open banking platform, Nordic API Gateway, for account aggregation to provide people with a full financial overview in their app. But according to Martin Junker, accessing deep coverage of financial data is not enough to secure the success of third-party providers who want to create user-centric solutions.
“Connecting people’s bank accounts to the app is step one. And when it’s done right with an open banking platform such as Nordic API Gateway, it’s easy to give our users an overview of their finances across different banks and accounts and automatically categorise their transactions based on high-quality data,” says Martin Junker and continues.
“But it’s not enough if your ambition is to be the preferred interface for people to manage their money. You need to give your users something more. You need to create features that connect with the users on an emotional level to fully succeed. And to accomplish this, you need to understand how big an influence our habits play in our lives. For the last 10 years, we have focused on creating user experiences that help people go from financial overview to financial insights. And now, we are just happy to announce that we will continue this mission throughout a big part of Europe.”
