" class="no-js "lang="en-US"> EXCLUSIVE: How to Understand Your Finances Whilst Staying On Top Of Your Mental Wellbeing
Friday, March 29, 2024

EXCLUSIVE: How to Understand Your Finances Whilst Staying On Top Of Your Mental Wellbeing.

Borrower Wellbeing Application Ilumoni has officially launched on iOS and Android after securing £1.63 million worth of investment cumulatively. Initial pre-seed investment funds totalled around £360,000 and those responsible for this figure consisted of Move Ventures alongside angel investors such as Simon Moran, former CMO and current Non-Executive Director of Premium Credit and Andy Dellar, former CEO of Dunbar Bank plc. Proceeding this initial injection of investment came an oversubscribed seeding round which saw a further £1.2 million raised for the company and 25 new Angel investors introduced.

With serious players involved and serious amounts of money being thrown around one must wonder, what is a borrower wellbeing app? To this I would say that it is exactly that, an application dedicated to the wellbeing of people borrowing money, thus a borrower wellbeing application. With research showing that 3 in 5 borrowers are not happy with their management of borrowing and 9 out of 10 UK borrowers unable to work out the total interest payable on a three year loan Ilumoni are on a mission to make things clearer and better for UK borrowers.

Ilumoni have identified four key issues that crop up for borrowers time and time again and that can be solved or helped through the use of their application. Their website denotes these four issues being ‘hurried decisions, too much jargon, time management and the merry go round of debt’ borrowers unwittingly onboard upon borrowing funds. This merry-go-round of debt specifically consists of high-interest products, mounting balance and shrinking incomes continually compounding a need for further credit.

With a report revealing that over 1 in 4 Brits regularly lose sleep over their borrowing and 20% feeling stressed, down, depressed, anxious about their borrowing a few times a month or more Ilumoni have identified the real gap in the market for a wellbeing borrower’s application. Whilst they cannot pay off one’s debt for them, they hope to help one’s well being by lowering the level of confusion around borrowing and concurrently lower the level of stress individuals feel about the state of their borrowing.

When a user downloads Ilumoni and is going through the initial set up process, they will be asked to enter their priorities and the application itself will bring together – with their permission – their financial information from credit reports, credit cards, personal loans, mortgages and bank accounts to give users a clear one stop shop to view what they owe, interest costs, time frames etc. The application will then show users the benefits of making changes to their repayment plans as well as alternative borrowing options they could pursue based on their budget and eligibility. Ilumoni itself is powered by AI as a way to remove some of the embarrassment or confusion that 58% of people feel as they prefer to chat about such topics as borrowing to an application.

The company’s business model also relies on being able to adequately help its customers with Ilumoni being completely free to download and the profits made by Ilumoni coming from an introductory fee from the lender. Prices on the application will also be identical to the prices one would see if they had gone directly to the lender, a concept which has been noted by their CEO, Gary Wigglesworth as key to Ilumoni when developing the app.

Applications such as Ilumoni are among the new wave of financial services really making the most of Open Banking and the – safe – freeing up of customer data, allowing them to ditch the carrot on a stick approach, tempting customers in with great deals before confronting them with the reality that they are not even eligible for most of their offering deals. Whilst the intentions of Ilumoni remain admirable it is yet to be seen whether the changes they will be presenting to their customer base will really be advantageous or further over complicating the matter in a bid to gain their introductory fee by gaining you a few pennies.

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