Cascade Cash Management has revealed it's next exciting five year plan, which highlights the company's quest to ensure effortless financial savvy for all. Here, managing director Dr Emma Black, shares her sneak peek:
“When we started Cascade in 2012, we recognised that the financial services market was not functioning well leading to poor outcomes for savers and borrowers. We listened to our clients and started our journey towards ensuring that no one is worse off financially because they don’t know about or can’t access the right product or service.
“Often, the problem is borne in a disconnect between customers goals and aims and the financial products available on the market. Financial products are built by banks, for banks and often the customers goals and aims are not easily matched. There are literally hundreds of providers offering thousands of everchanging products, each with its own onboarding process and risk management policy. Without transparent information that translates what should be considered in choosing between products, it’s no wonder many customers are missing out.
“To articulate the disconnect between bank and customer, consider a young couple saving to buy their own home. From the couple’s perspective, they wish to save to buy their dream home and once they have enough of a deposit, they wish to use that to buy the best home they can, then they’d like to live there and build their family home. The couple would like to make sure that they get the highest rate and depositor protection they can for their savings, and then they’d like a fair interest rate that they can comfortably service to own their own home when obtaining their mortgage. From the banks perspective, the bank wishes to pay the lowest rate it reasonably can to build its deposits book and then would like to lend that out at the highest rate it reasonably can to maximise its profits. It’s this disconnect that causes a problem in financial services – banks seeking to maximise profits for shareholders and customers trying to access basic financial services at reasonable and fair levels.
“The regulator is aware of this disconnect and a series of papers have been commissioned with regulatory guidance constantly being launched to try to ensure financial fairness for all. Cascade is aligned to the same goals. We are independent of any bank or building society and it’s this independence that gives us our competitive advantage. We are structurally unbiased and agnostic over where a customer’s money is placed. We are entirely aligned with our clients, seeking to get them the highest savings rate and depositor protection we can on their cash and we are now starting our journey to help our clients get the lowest borrowing rates and fairest terms available for their situation. We think this will help the regulator to improve competition in the market and lead to fairer outcomes for all. “We intend to deliver our plan in three distinct phases. In phase one, our objective is to expand our reach, increasing our market share by reducing our minimum deposit to £50,000 in the first instance. We’ll begin by building our mortgage and ISA datasets while continuing to develop our CascadePro (cash management for professionals) and CascadeData (savings analytics) services. In phase two, we will expand our offering by using our data and insight to design and launch bespoke savings and lending products while building our CascadeOpen digital banking platform. Finally, in phase three we are intent on transforming the market by offering a fully integrated savings, mortgages and loans platform with the option to expand our technology into new international markets too. “Our end outcome is effortless financial savvy for all. For savers, we will continue to build and launch a fully integrated savings offering whereby mass market savers in the UK can create a Cascade profile through our mobile app. Savers will be able to determine their personal savings requirements and will be led through the flow for choosing which accounts they should have and how much they need to hold in each. Their money will be automatically taken from where it is currently held and placed in the right amounts into their, also automatically opened and verified, new savings accounts. Within the Cascade app, savers will have access to a holistic view of all of their money. Their accounts will be constantly monitored against the market and adjusted to give them the best returns possible aligned to their bespoke situation. Cascade will fully digitise the administrative side of managing savings to reduce the hassle involved including bespoke requests for placing money on notice, enacting withdrawals, obtaining tax vouchers, notifying of audit requests and many other previously archaic processes. Cascade will help savers reach their savings goals. “For borrowers, we are building a full-service mortgage advisory platform whereby customers can log in to their mobile Cascade app and be guided through a seamless onboarding and mortgage requirements flow. Mortgage recommendations will be based on a combination of the user input requirements as well as Cascade’s own database of customer service levels, rates, onboarding processes and time to mortgage offers for each provider. From the Cascade app, borrowers will have their mortgage constantly monitored against the market with timely notifications for their bespoke situation including better rates and when initial fixed term periods end. Obtaining a mortgage through Cascade will be the smoothest experience possible owed to the fact that we will have fully digitised the administrative side of mortgages including pulling data from historical bank statements, credit reference agencies and the land registry. “We are raising £1m in our first phase on our journey to delivering our plan and are setting a maximum subscription per person of £50,000. Cascade is EIS eligible which means that there are attractive tax reliefs available to those that invest designed to encourage investment into new ventures which stand to create both growth and jobs to benefit the UK economy.”
