Exclusive: Ex-Monzo duo launch Sync Savings to fix UK’s broken cash savings market

Two former Monzo executives have launched a new fintech on a mission to fix the technology which underpins the UK’s broken cash savings market.

Just weeks after the FCA announced it would start naming and shaming savings providers offering the worst rates, Sync Savings has today closed its first pre-Seed round to build a product suite for banks to overhaul their savings infrastructure, AltFi can exclusively reveal.

“We're trying to reduce the cost of serving savings customers for small and medium-sized banks and building societies in the UK,” Sync Savings CEO and co-founder Joss Tasker told AltFi.

While the size of the round is not being disclosed, Tasker and her co-founder Alex Fox count several prominent angel investors among their early backers, including Charlie Delingpole, Mark Ransford, Phil Chambers and Michael Tefula.

Tasker and Fox both previously worked at the Octopus Group and Monzo, where Tasker worked as head of compliance and Fox led customer operations for Monzo’s business bank account.

Last month in its review of the UK’s cash savings market the FCA revealed that £250bn worth of retail savings are sitting in low-interest accounts, effectively earning nothing. 

Meanwhile, the UK’s best-rate savings accounts often involve jumping through several hoops to access including paper or in-branch applications and slow approval times, effectively cutting them off from ordinary savers.

Tasker and Fox’s solution with Sync Savings is two-fold. 

Firstly, to develop an entire end-to-end modern savings infrastructure platform with everything from onboarding to account management and customer service, that will help smaller savings providers to launch products far quicker and match the levels of service offered by the largest UK banks.

Then secondly, to enable API-based distribution of these savings products, which could pave the way for third parties (say a comparison website or stock trading app) to embed savings in the same way that lending and payments are often embedded today.

“The situation we're in today is that you have lots of money management apps and stock brokers which don't always give customers the option for cash savings,” said Tasker.

For Sync Savings, embedded savings are a ‘second phase’ for the business, with Tasker and her team focused on announcing their launch partner bank shortly.

“We've got live conversations with about 20 banks and building societies at home, and many more to come,” said Tasker.

“There's so much pent-up demand for good quality intuitive cash savings products.”