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STARTUP OF THE MONTH
Sit back, relax and let Bean count your pennies
Bean markets itself as “your own personal automated accountant, constantly checking up on your finances and helping you improve them”. CEO Peter Myatt tells us why the company is happy to do all the heavy lifting
Tell us about your company…
The mission for Bean (
usebean.com) is to enable our users to sleep safe in the knowledge that they are not wasting their money.
To use Bean all you need to do is connect your online bank statements through Open Banking. Bean will then scan through your transactions to find and show you all your regular payments. If you find a subscription that you no longer use, let us know and we will help you cancel it. No more sitting on the phone for hours listening to mind- numbing music. Bean will then monitor what is going on and let you know if you are paying more than you need to for anything else. If you want to do something about it, let us know and we will look to get you a better deal.
We set up Bean for a number of reasons. First, we could see how many of our friends and family struggled to properly manage their day-to- day spending. Second, when we started to look at the scale of the issue in the UK, we saw a massive opportunity. Saving rates are close to an all-time low, yet only 20% of people are switching their utility suppliers every year, or shopping around for insurance renewal rates, meaning that UK households are needlessly wasting vast amounts of money.
We looked further into the figures and saw a huge movement of consumer spending away from day-to-day spending and towards recurring spending. In fact, in the not-too-distant-future the subscription model will be taking over from day-to-day spending. It turns out that we love recurring payments – we can just set and forget them. However, because we forget them, we do not keep a proper eye on them, as we are not there when the money is taken out of our account. Bean sits there in the background humming away and making sure everything is in check.
What is your business model? It is completely free to use Bean and we do not allow advertising on
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Bean CEO Peter Myatt: the subscription model will soon be taking over from day-to-day spending
the site because we do not think that is the best way for our users to save money. However, as you would expect, running a platform like Bean is not free.
We think the best way to align our incentives with our mission and our users is to make sure that we only make money when our users save money. We do this by getting a commission payment when a user chooses to switch provider through our switching sites or take up one of our money saving offers.
Due to our focus on bills, we also find that Bean works particularly well with people who are in charge of the household budget. We find that when we work with these people, we are able to save them close to a thousand pounds every year.
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