Hey all,
I’m Alex, co-founder & CTO at Plum. Excited to be here – can't wait to hear your feedback and respond to your comments. Bram, thanks for the hunt!
Plum is a savings assistant that lives in Facebook Messenger. It links to your bank account (🇬🇧 only for now), monitors your spending and sets money aside for you, automatically. We’ve also just announced our partnership with RateSetter, one of the UK’s leading P2P platforms, so you can invest part (or all, even) of your Plum savings and start earning 3% interest.
PS: If you sign up coming from PH, you can skip all the queues and start investing as soon as the RateSetter integration goes into beta 🤗
PS2: Plum is UK-only for now!
@alexis_michael Great product!.... I bank with one of your supported banks. Their T&C's expressly state they will not be liable for any losses if I share my account information with third parties. When I read your T&C's both yourself and Yodlee are also indemnified from any losses. This is a difficult pill for me to swallow as it is basically asking me to trust you with my banking passwords but you are saying if yourself or a third party screw up then I suck up the loss. Apologies if I have misinterpreted anything, if I have please can you clarify, if not, are there any plans to work with the financial institutions to resolve this showstopper?
@chiphunnicutt Hi Chip, sad to hear that ;-) We were sceptical when we were launching but so far ppl have been fans despite being sceptics in the start. We clearly will and are thinking of new platforms to be on.. Is it just an app that would work for you? You can email me at victor@withplum.com
@victor_trokoudes@withplum Tying my finances to Facebook is simply a non-starter for me. That's a part of my life I prefer not exposing to that company.
Great concept. I'm living in the UK, and would love to try this.
I'm just curious about how you make money, especially since you mentioned that our money sits in an escrow (mangopay). I hope you understand my concern, it's always better for a financial institution to be transparent.
So it seems like basically you are investing money in a P2P platform (like LendingClub, for example) and just taking the split on the interest? This is in exchange for immediate liquidity, correct? Pretty smart!
@allnick Hey Nick we just think that as people start to accumulate savings via Plum they should have a place to put them that will earn them interest and have liquidity.. P2P works for that. And yes you are right liquidity is pretty much instant given depth of the marketplace but not guaranteed.. Good to hear you like it!
Been a Plum user for a few months now. Super easy to get started and great savings already building up! Congrats on launching on here guys! Wish you all the success in the future!
@xstex Hey Stephen, thanks for the feedback! We've debated a lot internally on the value of an app and it's something we are definitely thinking about launching in the future. Chat is great for certain use cases, and building on Messenger allows us to iterate very fast, but apps are still stronger when it comes to information presentation and more complex interactions. So stay tuned :)
I wonder if you guys plan to launch it on a global scale. I would love to use the app but I am from India and I guess I cannot use that app from here. :/
Would love to try if launched here! Would help me spend less and save more.
@steven_harries Thanks for the feedback! Definitely, our error messages are less than stellar in some cases :) As Victor said, we've focused on building the UX for UK users so far, but we will be fixing that.
@victor_trokoudes@steven_harries Perhaps removing the country drop down menu or allowing for user sign up outside the UK? I'd love to at least get on a waitlist for the US :)
@hthrjns@victor_trokoudes agree with Heather. Plum looks like an excellent product. All I meant was from a UX perspective is to at least provide exact feedback why US users can't sign-up within the signup process. It's a simple fix. All the best and will be looking out for the US release. Good luck!
Looks good, i started using it, but after being victim of a scam lately i decided to check out the terms - Section 12 is super-scary - what financial protections are in place to make sure i don't lose my money?
@danmatthews Hey Daniel good to hear some skepticism. So your money sits with our partner MangoPay which is regulated as an eMoney institution. This means that your savings remain at MangoPay till you withdraw them from Plum. eMoney rules stipulate that your money is ring-fenced from the operations of MangoPay, Plum and our partner bank, ie it can't go anywhere!
Using Facebook messenger raises a few security concerns.
Do you require additional authentication beyond the standard Facebook messenger login to interact with the bot?
If somebody has access to my facebook messenger (eg. forget to log out on someone else's laptop) can they browse all historical interactions in the messenger thread and interact with the bot to check account balance & invest plum savings?
@pdffy Hey Peter, thanks for your comment! For now we're relying on Messenger for chat authentication but we're already working on adding a second layer of security. It's a bit tricky to get it right on the bot without it being too cumbersome on the user experience. If you have thoughts on the matter, I'd love to hear them at alex@withplum.com :)
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