While third-party personal finance apps have garnered attention through direct-to-consumer offerings, HT Mobile Apps is looking to reach more users by offering savings and financial literacy tools to partner institutions. The eight-year-old company is working with banking technology giant FIS to reach new financial institutions.

Through the FIS partnership, HTMA, which currently partners with 41 banks and credit unions, is looking to more than double its client numbers in 2020, founder and CEO Kathleen Craig told Bank Innovation.

According to Craig, the key to the company’s growth will be word-of-mouth referrals and maintaining a low attrition rate. She said the company has a 100% referral rate from its partners.

“Especially in the credit union space, it’s very interesting,” she said. “They all know each other, and they share.”

The tie-up with FIS amounts to a progression of its relationship with the banking technology provider; HTMA graduated from the FIS accelerator in 2017.

Based in Ann Arbor, Mich., HTMA’s current clients include Chemical Bank, which merged with TCF Bank in August, as well as Bank Michigan and Altra Federal Credit Union. The company generates revenue from fees partner banks and credit unions pay to use its platforms. Craig said the goal is to have more than 100 partners as soon as possible.

Platforms developed by HTMA have the potential to help smaller institutions retain customers, since banks risk losing transactional activity to third-party apps. If banks don’t embed digital money management tools into their digital banking offerings, they stand to lose out on an important opportunity, Bob Meara, senior analyst at Celent, wrote in a recent blog post.

HTMA offers institutions app platforms to keep their customers in their ecosystems, and the products are aimed at helping clients grow their deposit bases. Its savings app Plinqit allows users to set savings goals and transfer funds to a savings account held by a partner bank or credit union. Users can link any checking account, so Plinqit also functions as a customer acquisition tool for its partners.

In turn, partner banks can use spending and saving data from Plinquit to cross-sell other products. The app also features educational content from partner institutions, which gives users cash-back rewards for completing the course modules. According to HTMA, more than half of Plinqit users, 55%, go through the process of reading the educational content, rating the content and taking a two-question quiz. HTMA said the app’s total deposits grew 287% in 2019.

See also: How savings app Plinqit wants to help banks

In addition to Plinqit, HTMA offers financial literacy apps for banks and credit unions called Banker Jr. and Member Jr., respectively. The goal of these tools is to engage children who could become future bank customers. In 2019, the company acquired Hip Pocket, which allows end users to answer a series of questions to see which bank products could be suited to their needs. Although Craig said the plan is to keep developing apps in-house, she didn’t rule out the possibility of future acquisitions in the future.

HTMA, which has raised just under $3 million, is backed by investors that include FIS, Stout Capital and Invest Michigan. According to Craig, users have saved more than $750,000 through Plinqit.

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