Moven Opens Its Doors Wider And Will Move to Mobile Originations By the End of Summer

Moven is opening its doors wider — two Bank Innovation staffers received invitations to join the beta yesterday.

There goes the neighborhood.

Or maybe not — NetBanker received his invitation yesterday as well.

Moven is a “mobile money service that helps you spend, save and live smarter,” according to the company’s site. In other words, it is a direct bank that is intended to be accessed through a user’s smartphone.

The invites received by Bank Innovation were similar but subtly different. One carried the subject, “Your Moven Invite!” while the other read, “Get Moven Now!” A/B testing, perhaps? Both email invitations contained links to a video showing how the service works before signing up. The Get Moven Now! version also played up the service’s Facebook integration more strongly.

The signup process, as noted by NetBanker, is a simple one. We noted that signup required going to a desktop or laptop — in other words, it’s not mobile-only.

It appeared that Facebook integration was needed for signup. Moven sent us the following note: “Facebook is no longer required for sign-in/log-in. New users can create Username/Password now as a choice.  Folks who have already registered with Facebook though cannot change to Username/Password yet.  That’s coming.”

We reached out to Moven president Alex Sion for comment. Sion said the bank was opening the doors a bit, but not too wide. Moven is “still working through [its] beta plan methodically,” he said.

The mobile signup is “the very next thing” the service is doing, and Sion expects it to be live by the end of the summer. The reason the bank started online was that “We began with testing our financial wellness features for our earliest customer set,” according to Sion. But he expects that early customers will rarely if ever, need to access the online site after signup.

“Paying for stuff, getting the digital receipt, simple/quick checks of our Money Pulse to get your financial bearings, and moving money to friends is 99.9% of what we think [customers will] do in the early days,” he said. “Then impulse savings on mobile and CRED rewards to follow.” (CRED is the bank’s credit scoring system, which Brett King, Moven’s founder, described as an engagement model “that goes beyond just pure risk assessment.”)

Moven is more aggressively “mobile-first” than competitors GoBank and Simple in that it is committed to making the smartphone a payment device with its NFC-enabled sticker.

There is no official word on when the beta program will end, but if you’re still waiting for your invite, be patient. Sion said, “It’s not about volume for us right now … Though we do need some volume to have meaningful learnings.”