Credit Karma Chooses Bud to Help Members Make Smart Money Decisions

Credit Karma, the consumer technology platform with more than 110 million members across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., has partnered with Bud in a move to provide Open Banking access and smarter services to its members in the UK.

Credit Karma provides customers in the U.K. with one of the most advanced and personalised experiences in the market, including complete access to their credit history as well as truly free services to help monitor and build their credit. Most importantly, Credit Karma provides members with access to the financial products best suited for their financial situation. The fintech was an entry into the UK market following the 2019 acquisition of Noddle and was drawn here, in part, by the opportunity created through Open Banking.

Credit Karma will implement Bud’s Open Banking data aggregation and transaction intelligence platform in a move to underpin a set of new features that help members to optimise credit through access to better financial products and manage their bills more efficiently with in-app switching services.

Bud’s technology provides a secure channel for members to share their data through Open Banking. The platform then analyses and enriches that data, creating insights that power new personalised services for customers. As well as fintechs like Credit Karma, the platform is used by some of the world’s biggest financial services firms, from HSBC in the UK to ANZ in New Zealand, both to power new features in their apps and to enable them to deliver better and more personalised services.

The partnership between Bud and Credit Karma comes at a time when both financial services and the customers they serve are facing a unique set of challenges. Factors like the threat of negative interest rates and the risk posed by credit file masking have combined with a widening savings gap and increased income instability to create an environment where the opportunity for a more open and personalised approach to financial data is self-evident.

“Having one’s financial information in a single destination empowers consumers to make smarter financial decisions,” said Ziad El Baba, General Manager Credit Karma UK and Canada. “This partnership enables Credit Karma to better help our consumers to make financial progress and provides our members with greater transparency into financial products they qualify for. Through the years since its inception, Credit Karma has been working hard to put customers in control, and to have full visibility of the factors affecting their credit score. Our new partnership with Bud marks a significant step forward in our campaign for greater transparency, providing us with a wealth of insight that gives customers more power over their financial future while enabling banks to make better, more informed decisions.”

Ed Maslaveckas, Bud’s CEO added, “There hasn’t been this much societal change over such a short period in living memory. We’re seeing a unique set of problems in the financial sector that are emerging at incredible speed and which all have one thing in common – you solve them with better data portability, better insight, and more transparency. Without that, you don’t have a chance of addressing them. Companies like Credit Karma are leading the way to a better and fairer financial sector, and our intelligence platform is playing a significant role in bringing about the open banking revolution.”