Moven (consumer bank)

» see moven.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Brett King started Movenbank in 2011, two years before most people had heard the phrase challenger bank and several years before anyone was funding them properly. The premise was that a bank did not need branches or a charter of its own, only a card and an app good enough that you would stop thinking about the institution behind it. King had written a book making that case and then went and built the thing, which is a rarer sequence than it sounds.

The product was a prepaid account with a debit card and an app that tried to be a spending coach rather than a ledger. It scored your financial health and nudged you when a purchase looked out of pattern, with the balance on the first screen instead of three taps deep. Nine years later almost every retail banking app in the United States does some version of this, mostly because early companies like Moven demonstrated that customers would tolerate it.

Being early is not the same as being funded. By 2019 Chime had millions of accounts and hundreds of millions of dollars, and Moven had a good product and a plan to spin the consumer business out so it could raise on its own terms. That spin-out needed one large multi-year commitment. In March 2020 the commitment was withdrawn.

~ the record ~

~ what the app actually did ~

Moven's distinguishing feature was that it treated a transaction as an event worth reacting to. Buy something unusual and the app said so, in the moment, on the receipt. The vocabulary at the time was financial wellness, and the underlying claim was that people overspend through inattention rather than intent, so the fix is a well-timed interruption.

Whether that claim is true is still an open question in the research. What is not in question is that the interface pattern won. Real-time notifications and an unrequested spending breakdown are now standard issue in an app you did not choose for that reason. Moven patented parts of it, which turned out to be the durable asset.

~ march 2020 ~

The announcement went out on 24 March 2020, nine days after most of the United States had shut down. Moven said it was moving to enterprise only and closing every consumer account, and customers got the email on the 25th telling them the 30 April date. The company recommended Varo, a competitor that had a real banking charter application in progress, which is a candid thing to do on the way out.

The reported arithmetic was that continuing the consumer bank in its existing form meant absorbing something like a $2 million loss for the year. That is not a large number for a fintech in 2020, and in a market with functioning capital it would have been bridged in a week. Markets stopped functioning in the middle of March, which is how a nine-year-old company with a working product ends up sending closure emails a fortnight later.

~ the part that survived ~

Moven Enterprise, which licenses the wellness technology to banks that want it inside their own apps, kept going and still runs at moven.com. The company therefore survives, minus the half of it a member of the public could join. For the people who had accounts, the closure email arrived either way.

This is one of the deaths where the local view is genuinely different. The American challenger banks were built against incumbent apps that were slow and hostile, and that gap is what they sold into. Turkish retail banking had gone the other way, with the big banks shipping serious mobile apps early enough that there was no room underneath them for a startup selling a nicer interface. A category can be inevitable in one country and unnecessary in another, at the same time, for the same reason.

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