Dominating consumer banking is, without a doubt, a Holy Grail of fintech. The vast army of neobanks is targeting all types of consumers there is – from the always hungry for credit SMEs to the Millennials to your neighbourhood dentist or your trusty mechanic. By some of the current estimates, there are at least 5,000 startups worldwide that are eyeing your cash and are competing for an opportunity to care for it. And that’s up from 2,000 just a few years back.

In the first nine months of 2019, VCs have poured almost $3 billion into neobanks – a 30% increase compared with all of 2018. The market is not only oversaturated and grossly overinvested, with this much VC money sloshing around, it’s headed for a disaster. It was clear to us that the industry needs to reconceptualise itself offering a new perception of investing, money management, and financial well-being to customers the world over.

Smartee has been on our minds and in our blog for a while now, but as this new and exciting adventure is taking shape, we feel it’s time to talk about it in some detail. Particularly, we want to take this opportunity to explain what makes Smartee different from every other emerging neobank.

Let’s start from the beginning. Smartee is a Smartlands-powered full-featured digital banking solution. At first glance, Smartee may seem like a very well-rounded online banking service offering such key features as:

Free current account in EUR, GBP, USD + a wallet for the most popular digital currencies

Free payment card with all attributed to the Smartee brand power and flexibility

A broad range of the exchange options: digital money to EUR, GBP, USD or other currencies in minutes

Real-time invoicing, reporting, free company cards

However, there are several crucial elements of Smartee that constitute the core value of this new Smartlands-powered service. Firstly, Smartee is designed for a wide audience of all ages and vocations, for people who are in constant need of reliable exchanges, fast cross-border transfers, advanced account management and payment options.

Specifically, during the process of creating Smartee, we intended to draw attention to a common problem. The task of saving money has always been a difficult one to solve. It’s hard to allocate your earnings and redistribute any extra cash you might have left. And having cold hard cash sit idly in your account is the worst you can do: money must be working at all times, creating wealth and growing your fortune.

Think of Smartee this way. Remember how you used to dump unwanted small coins? Indeed, they are useless in most cases, but after a while, they accumulate in quantities that are impossible to ignore. You pick up that glass jar (a piggy bank, a container of some sort) and drag it to the bank grunting and swearing along the way.

No more. We have developed a new comfortable mechanism when the cashback from payments or a small part of your daily payment card expenses, for example 1%, will be automatically sent to the same “digital piggy bank”. At that point, a robot-adviser does the rest making the funds work for you 24 hours a day.

A Smartee user will be able to configure independently the type and scope of the investment offers available on Smartlands and take advantage of the investment mechanism – a pinnacle of the Smartlands proprietary tech (imagine the size of your investment portfolio after six months or a year, given the almost negligible costs of building it!).

We plan on launching Smartee very soon. Hopefully, the first users will be able to register and order their Smartee payment cards this month.

CAN YOUR BANK DO IT?