South African financial services provider Liberty launched its Stash investment application (app) earlier this month to help improve a local savings culture by providing a solution that removes the complexity and fear associated with investing.
Stash is designed to mitigate all the complicated investment jargon, processes, forms and cashing-out difficulties. It also reduces the amount of time it takes to meet with a financial adviser.
Once Stash is downloaded, users receive R50 upfront to start their investment journey. Every time a user refers a friend, they are rewarded with an additional R10 to their Stash account.
“When it comes to investing, getting started is the hardest part,” says Stash head developer Juan Labuschagne, who adds that the research involved in investing can often be daunting and off-putting. “Investing should be as easy as tweeting – that’s the goal of Stash.”
Users decide how much they want to invest and the app automatically rounds up the amount of every transaction. For example, if a user decides that his or her Stash transaction limit is R10 and makes a transaction for R45, this would be rounded up to R50. The R5 in change is stashed in the user’s account.
“All this spare change accumulates without interfering with your day-to-day life,” Labuschagne says, adding that Stash checks the users’ daily bank balance and never transfers more than they can afford, removing the risk of going into overdraft.