The financial app ‘Goin’ to help consumers save faster

• Consumers can grow funds across fiat and crypto with savings Super-App

• Expansion across Europe will see big focus on France and Italy

• Collaboration among fintechs is the key to innovation in Spain

In recent years, buy now, pay later has increased in popularity, as embedded finance increasingly becomes embedded in our lives. However, some organisations are giving consumers another option to acquire the things they really want and Spanish fintech Goin is one such example.

The Barcelona-based business, which launched in 2018, is helping people make purchases with a proposition that you might describe as save now, buy sooner. To learn more about Goin, we spoke to Davo Bastidas, Chief Operating Officer. Here’s what he had to say:

Goin’s mission

Goin is a B2C company focussed on rewarding saving and shopping. We’re trying to change the way people shop by making products more accessible through discounts, cashback and in general more efficient shopping. This is considerably around rewards, but we’re helping people end to end, right from the moment a person wants something to the point in which they start saving for it, growing their money and when they actually make the purchase.

There are lots of tools that help people on different parts of the shopping path. But none of them is consolidating all of the potential benefits a user might have. So we’re trying to make shopping faster and cheaper for a user basically to improve their finances. We want to be there across that path so that the user gets the best, most efficient and cheapest experience in acquiring something they want.

Marqeta’s perspective

This is a great example of how digital technology companies approach a problem – by looking at the entire journey and building a solution to remove pain points and speed up a process for the end user.

The kinds of things Goin enables people to buy:

We don’t think people want money just for money itself; we believe that people want money for achieving things, whether it’s a vacation or a bicycle or a car or a house. And we want to be able to help people make the smartest decisions with their money in order to achieve the things they want in the cheapest and most efficient way. In terms of focus, we are category agnostic. However, we are able to support specific categories more strongly, like travel, tech and vehicles, but we’ve also helped people save for everything from a Friday night out, up to actually paying for a mortgage for their house.

We’re also seeing people changing their shopping decisions and how they want to use their money along the way. So we want to be there for whenever they want to switch from buying a new TV to paying for their broken motorcycle.

Marqeta’s perspective

At the heart of compelling financial products is an ability to empower customers to live life on their terms. By working across spending categories, it’s possible to broaden appeal to a wider audience.

The ways in which Goin helps people to save:

In addition to different ways to shop through us or our partners with discounts and cashbacks, we offer different saving mechanisms. We also offer ways to invest, mostly in cryptocurrencies and decentralised protocols. We have a crypto marketplace where you can buy the most common crypto coins, as well as some smaller coins through us, enabling people to convert crypto and fiat currency to crypto.

However, we’re not an exchange where you can get your coins out or get other coins in, but you can access the benefits of what you purchase. Alongside this we do very quick on-ramping for decentralised protocols. You can convert and you can invest in decentralised protocols with fiat with just one click. For example, users can put money on the blockchain to lenders and receive some APR in return. The interest is much higher than what you would get from traditional banking and we’re offering this as a saving accelerator mechanism within the app.

Marqeta’s perspective

It’s fascinating to see personal wealth considered from a completely different angle. Old linear ways of earning, saving and buying are being replaced by a multi-channel approach to making money work harder.

Collaboration across the Spanish financial services ecosystem

We work with most European banks, either in a direct or indirect capacity. So in Spain, it’s very much directly due to local relationships but across the other markets it tends to be indirect through either a bank aggregator or seed banks.

In terms of innovation, the traditional banks are increasingly offering services through fintech-oriented spin-offs using the same underlying technology. The most interesting collaboration is coming from fintech-born apps. We interact with other apps from the region and I think that’s where the innovation is happening the most. That said, we’re not trying to replace banks. We hope to be able to offer people a good shopping experience and good financial solutions on top of whoever their banking provider is.

Marqeta’s perspective

Collaboration between banks and fintechs is an ongoing process but the important thing to watch is not necessarily who’s partnering with whom, but what is happening to the ecosystem and how financial services are being consumed. Increasingly, in this era of change, relevance is the most important consideration.

Where Goin’s going next?

We’re very mindful that it’s been a tough year for the economy, so our next 12 months are going to be focussed on continuing to give users a superior proposition, while also finding different business opportunities for Goin itself. Part of this includes expansion. We have a presence in more than 20 countries in Europe, but we’re going to have a big emphasis on France and Italy this year.

The second thing we want to do is help users measure their success in terms of how many euros they’ve saved. This will involve finding more ways to give users rewards for regular day-to-day spending activity – as well as expanding ways to obtain rewards and the types of channel we currently operate in. This means moving into web and Chrome extensions.

Marqeta’s perspective

Helping users to see how a product or service is benefiting them through metrics and reports makes good sense, as it reinforces why they use your proposition and deepens the relationship.

To find out more about Goin, visit the website here.