Nude

There's no place like your first home

Nude’s mission is to stand up for first time home buyers, by making it super easy for them to save for a home. A recent YouGov survey highlighted the potential anxieties faced by first time buyers, revealing that 46% of young people are uncertain about saving for their future. “The financial system around home buying can be daunting, but it doesn’t need to be,” said Crawford Taylor, CEO and Founder.

That’s why Crawford and his team set up Nude. The app has a truly modern approach to saving, using behavioural science to motivate users to reach their deposit target. “Take running,” Crawford said. “We know more people will hit their goals if they have a clear target to aim for, like signing up for a marathon, or getting friends and family to support them. So we applied the same principles to saving a deposit to buy a house.”

In the app, users can visualise the type of house they want and where they want to live. This is then linked to property prices, showing the contributions they’ll need to make to reach their savings goal and how quickly they can get there.

Instant payments: Get set, grow

Nude users can choose to make regular or one-off payments – which Nude calls contributions – to their savings pot. That means Nude receives money in a variety of ways, from regular monthly payday contributions, to single payments when people can afford them.

Behind the scenes, all Nude’s payments are managed by GoCardless. “100% of contributions that leave customers’ accounts and come into Nude come through GoCardless,” Crawford said.

GoCardless introduced Nude to instant one-off payments, powered by open banking. “Instant Bank Pay has been amazing for us because the payments credit our customers’ accounts more quickly and give them a much clearer understanding of where they stand.”

It’s a win for all parties, and a major stress reducer for Nude’s customers, like personal trainer (and GoCardless user herself) Frankie Clark: “There’s so much I love about Nude! The app is really easy and simple to use. When my income does fluctuate, I need the ability to be able to change it, because it puts way too much pressure on me. Or if I need to cancel a month, there's no fear that I'm going to be charged or things like that. Having that flexibility is really important, and also having the urgency and importance for it as well. It's a really sweet balance.”

Peace of mind for busy start-ups

GoCardless has been Nude’s payments partner since they launched in 2020. “We did an analysis of the payments market at the time and GoCardless stood out,” Crawford said. “When you’re pulling together the infrastructure to run a company, it’s really important to choose the right partners. GoCardless had a flexible offering. They delivered on time. The platform was easy to use and integrate with, and our developers found the documentation easy to follow. It all worked really well.”

And the Nude team is still sure they made the right choice today. “If GoCardless says they’ll deliver something, they do,” Crawford said. “The platform is very stable, and they're a nice bunch of people to work with, especially our Enhanced Customer Success Manager.”

Game-changing innovation thanks to open banking

In addition to regular and one-off payment contributions, GoCardless’ open banking expertise also enables a number of Nude’s most unique features, such as Gift Time.

“There's a lot of things that we can do with open banking for budgeting and managing finances,” said Yoann Pavy, CMO, Nude. “Gift Time is a feature that allows friends and family to contribute to users’ Lifetime ISAs via a unique link, without the hassle of entering bank details. The experience we’ve built around that lets Mum or Dad see how much time their contribution shaves off the journey to the overall savings goal. And for our users, instant payments make it simpler to move money than it is with the traditional Direct Debit system.”

Nude expects developments such as this to be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to open banking-driven innovation. 

“Open banking has a lot of potential, especially VRPs,” said Yoann. “The technology is ideal for sweeping, for example, which means automatically moving money between accounts or savings pots owned by the same person. This could be set up to reflect someone’s wealth management strategy. That's the next step for open banking."

Nude expects to work on more creative new features like this in the coming months. “We’re looking forward to the next evolution of payments in the form of VRPs that will make regular payments instantaneous too,” added Crawford. “This additional flexibility will be a game-changer for our customers and we’re delighted that it won’t be long before that vision becomes a reality.”