You can now download Cake, the profitable banking app. 🎉
This version of our app is only the beginning of our journey to building the best independent banking app that tries to make your bank accounts profitable again! 💶
You can now download Cake, the profitable banking app. 🎉
This version of our app is only the beginning of our journey to building the best independent banking app that tries to make your bank accounts profitable again! 💶
The journey so far
At the end of October, 250 beta users started testing the first beta-version of Cake! 🎉 In the months after, we added up to 1.000 users to the beta on iOS and android. 🚀
And today, we have hit another important milestone. Our app is now publicly available in the App store and on Google Play. 💥 Needless to say, we are super excited about this! 💃
Although now everybody can download our app, this is and will remain, a beta version for the coming months. What you will see when you install the app today is still a limited version of what Cake will be able to do in the future.
The open beta
So far the beta has been focusing on 2 main goals that will remain important in the latest version of the app as well.
- Testing the bank connections
As you might have heard the connectors provided by the banks which should enable us to link existing bank accounts to Cake differ tremendously between banks. 🏦 Although the banks are legally obliged to have this connection (the so-called API) ready, we noticed that a number of them still don’t offer usable API’s that we believe to be of sufficient quality.
Even though all banks should have been ready by mid-September last year, this means that today we still can’t support banks such as ING, BNP Paribas Fortis and Argenta.😩
Want to see if your bank is supported? Check out the list of supported banks.
In order to put more pressure on the banks to comply with the PSD2 regulation, we decided to join forces 🤝 with other start-ups who are noticing the same challenges. Earlier this week, we started the A78 interest group. A78’s goal is to address this problem together with the National Bank of Belgium and the non-compliant banks. - Improving the quality of the transactional data
The Cake data team is building a system powered by artificial intelligence that automagically re-labels transactions and adds additional information to it. 🤖 We do need to train this system quite a bit, both manually and by collecting feedback from our users about their transactions.
Thanks to the first batch of beta users on the platform, we’ve already been able to make impressive progress on the transactional data quality. Over 55.000 transactions have been linked to retail locations and/or brands! 🙌
Further opening-up our beta to the public should speed-up the training of our algorithms even more, so we can deliver beautiful transactional information to you all! 🏃♀️🏃♂️💨
What’s new?
We are happy to introduce the first version of Cake Rewards! 💰
This release was quite extensive, as it kicks our business model into action. 🚀
Our first revenue model is that Cake sells fully anonymised statistics and insights to commercial partners. These insights are based on the transactional data of the Cake users. Don’t worry, all these insights are fully anonymised! 🕵
What’s cool about this? Well, we feel that you should get your share of the cake, and eat it too! 🍰 When your data is used in generating these insights, we share a portion of the generated revenue with you. This is how Cake will try and make your bank accounts profitable again!
Additionally, the second revenue model is that our commercial partners can now target anonymous Cake users with additional cashback Rewards. For instance, this means that if you’re a serious shoe-aficionado, a chain that sells shoes might offer you 5% instant cashback through Cake, the next time you shop at one of their locations. 💰
The payout will, after a one-time identification, automagically flow onto your connected bank account, every time you earn a Reward! 🧙
We have spent quite a bit of time testing and validating this implementation.
In the latest version of the app, you will now see the following features👇
- The Reward offer of the day
- All Reward offers selected just for you
- You can click on a Reward offer to review its details
- Functionality to confirm your identity to receive Rewards
- A transactions list of all your Cake Rewards so far
- The ability to pay out your Cake earnings
And there’s more
We additionally added some more essential features. This list combines a number of smaller requirements to complete the core framework of Cake, and includes some quick-wins that have been requested by our beta users.
You can now👇
- Change the name of your bank accounts (including emoji’s! 💸)
- Add savings and investment accounts
- Change your bank account type to a current, savings or investment account
- Change your bank account type to a personal or private business account
- Review the current connection status of your bank account
- View the total Balance across all your accounts
- Review the total, evolution of, and the average of your income, spending and savings
- Look up our terms and the privacy policy in the settings screen
- Copy transaction details
- Enable dark mode
And last but not least … the app has now also been released in Dutch and French, whereas previously the beta was only in English. 💪
Up next
In the next month, we will be adding more reports 📈 (combined insights in the finances of our users), and allow users to configure proactive transactional push notifications. We will additionally revise the transaction feedback process, making it easier for Cake users to enrich the transaction data.
If you want to keep track of our progress or if you have some feedback, questions or suggestions, please check out our open roadmap.
There, you can provide us with feedback on features while they are still in development, and help steer us in the right direction. 🧭 You can even add new ideas to our roadmap or vote on ideas of others. This will allow us to build the product people want, faster.
So do let us know when you have ideas on how we can improve Cake in the future. Share it with us. Submit it. Vote on existing ideas, and join the discussion. The most active monthly users might win a private dinner with our CEO… 🤫
There’s still an incredible amount of work left to be done, but from now on we will move into smaller, much more frequent releases. So you can expect to see new cool features frequently! 👷♂️
Thank you for following us on our journey, and especially a big welcome and thank you to our beta testers so far and our new users! 💪 Not only are you a big help to the development team, but you also help motivate our team to make Cake the best banking app in the world. 🥇
We will continue to give regular transparent updates on the development of Cake, so keep following us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. 💬 And of course, we will certainly also post it there! 📌
Download the app and enjoy your piece of the cake! 🍰