A new shopping and rewards app, Moneyworks, hit the Google Play store yesterday.
Another shopping and rewards app? Yes. But Moneyworks, which launched but a week ago, offers a bit of a twist in that it is predictive and can push relevant offers to users before users are even aware of the store or product.
“By combining user’s credit card data with geolocation data from their mobile phone, Moneyworks can predict user shopping behavior,” the company’s founder, Ben Weiss, wrote Bank Innovation. Deals are pushed to users from services such as Groupon, LivingSocial, and Yelp. The data being mined, of course, is card transaction data, so Moneyworks knows where you went and uses that to determine where you might be likely to go.
Leveraging the user’s own data allows the service to push “the right offer at the right time,” the company says. Moneyworks also gets personal financial management into the mix, offering a budgeting tool with goals for savings, vacations, or paying down debt. The savings that comes from Moneyworks offers can contribute to these goals.
The first iteration of Moneyworks, Weiss says, will be to alert users to nearby deal and offers. Expanded functionality, leveraging the app’s expected greater depth of data, is on tap.
Moneyworks is launching as a consumer-facing app, but its roadmap includes partnering with banks and embedding itself within the offers portion of a bank’s app, much like Cardlytics, which powers BankAmeriDeals. The service could help banks incentivize savings and monetize data with participating merchants.
A senior banker discussing Moneyworks pointed out that brand marketers must prove conversions, and the Moneyworks service does not seem to address this. More problematic may be differentiating from powerful players in a crowded space, but the predictive twist, if pleasing to consumers, could give Moneyworks a boost.
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