Meet Variable Spend: our latest feature for intelligent expense tracking
Despite the personalisation of financial services, making expense tracking both detailed and user friendly is a challenge. Meet our new feature, Variable Spend – designed to help consumers proactively take control of their finances by categorising spending into comprehensive yet easy-to-digest insight.
Making expense tracking intuitive and user friendly – as well as detailed – can be challenging
Variable Spend, a new feature of Tink’s Data Enrichment product, has launched to tackle this issue, helping banks offer their customers more insight
Going further than a broad overview, Variable Spend helps banks proactively show their customers the top components of their day-to-day expenses
Finding efficient ways of reducing monthly expenditure can be challenging at the best of times, let alone during the fluctuating cost of living. For consumers, staying on top of, analysing and taking action on spending habits can be laborious and draining. And for financial service providers like banks, the prospect of building logic on top of complex transaction data with a range of additional factors can be daunting. This results, more often than not, in apps and services that provide an overview of a person’s spending per category – but not their top expenses month to month. As pressures from the cost-of-living crisis mount, the time to act is now – and it’s not as complex to achieve as you might think.
Introducing Tink’s Variable Spend feature
Reinforcing our Data Enrichment product, Variable Spend is a feature that helps financial service providers enhance their money management UX, without having to worry about building a complete PFM solution in house. As an enrichment layer, Variable Spend does the heavy lifting for you, removing the need to build logic on top of your transaction data. What’s more, Variable Spend empowers financial institutions with the best basis possible for offering customers more nuanced budget management solutions.
In short, Variable Spend analyses the way your customer makes repeat purchases and identifies their most heavily concentrated expenditure. When you’ve implemented the Variable Spend feature with us, you’ll be able to display your customer’s top expense categories – sorted by number of transactions and amount. For your customer, they will then see a projection of these ‘most spent’ categories.
How consumers benefit
Our 2023 research estimated that almost one in four Brits “were ‘financially vulnerable’ as their income no longer covers their essential spending”, and that of this group, 45% of the ‘financially vulnerable’ would switch to another bank if it identified better deals or money saving opportunities.* Additional research in Germany and France found that over half (53%) of German consumers surveyed used their savings to cover their current costs – and 60% of French consumers surveyed felt forced to choose between essential products.*
Evidently, consumer expectations of their banks are extending to help with tracking their expenses – intuitively, at speed and in more detail. Variable Spend enables financial service providers to:
support customers with a fast, user-friendly way of monitoring their day-to-day expenses
proactively show the top components of a user’s monthly costs, as opposed to a broad overview per category
help customers reduce guesswork, identify places to minimise their monthly spend more efficiently – and increase their savings.
Ready to leverage intelligent solutions like Variable Spend to build your consumer engagement? Learn more about scaling your financial services or get in touch with our team.
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About the research
*For the UK: the research was conducted by Censuswide with 2,010 general consumers in the UK (nationally representative) 17–19 January, 2023. Censuswide abide by and employ members of the Market Research Society which is based on the ESOMAR principles and are members of The British Polling Council.
*For France: the study was conducted by Opinion Way on behalf of Tink 25–26 January, 2023 with a sample of 1007 people representative of the French population aged 18 and over. The sample was drawn up according to the quota method, with regard to the criteria of sex, age, socio-professional category, category of agglomeration and region of residence.
*For Germany: the survey was conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Tink 1–3 February, 2023 with a sample size of 1,000 German adults. The sample was representative of the German population aged 18 years and over, with quotas based on gender, age, socio-professional category, urban area and region of residence.
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