Scott Mowbray Tells Us How Snoop is Always Finding Clever Ways for You to Save Money at the Places You Already Spend


Scott Mowbray Snoop

Scott Mowbray, the cofounder of Snoop, tells us how the app can show all the bank accounts and credit card information in one place.

Tell us about Snoop and the team.

Scott Mowbray: Based in London and Norwich, Snoop is an award-winning business that helps people spend, save and live smarter. The platform provides data-driven, personalized insights to help consumers find their biggest money-saving opportunities using secure open banking data and advanced analytics. Snoop was founded by a group of highly experienced former Virgin Money executives, led by the bank’s former CEO, Jayne-Anne Gadhia. Together we shared a belief that creating an Open Banking-based proposition would enable us to deliver profoundly better outcomes for consumers and help us to deliver on our ambition to make everyone better off.

How does Snoop market its product/services online? 

Scott Mowbray: Primarily digitally, with ‘App install’ Campaigns on a number of platforms – the traditional biddable channels (Facebook/TikTok/Google, etc.) along with Mobile Display and affiliate programs. We use a mixture of in-house developed ad creative and influencer style content.

What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to manage your online marketing?

Scott Mowbray: We use a ‘Mobile Measurement Partner’ (MMP) called Appsflyer to aggregate install and in-app event conversion from all of our different media sources. Our brilliant in-house team manages this, and performance is reviewed daily to ensure optimal performance.

What is your hiring policy/process?

Scott Mowbray: We look to hire talented, hardworking people who believe in Snoop’s ambition to help make everyone better off. I think it’s really important to recognize that conformity doesn’t create innovation and growth. You need diversity in business to mirror society and be innovative, creative, and relevant. That’s what we aim to achieve when hiring at Snoop.

How are you funding your growth?

Scott Mowbray: We’ve raised £34 million to date, including a £10 million round in December 2020 (Europe’s second-largest crowdfund that year) and a £15 million Series A funding (2021) from leading American investment management firm Paulson & Co. Inc.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Scott Mowbray: Ultimately, we believe that by combining the best capability of the neo-banks, money management, price comparison websites, switching services, cashback sites, and money saving services into one app – we are delivering something uniquely useful, super relevant, and practical in the everyday lives of people. 

The cost-of-living crisis is an excellent example of what we’ve been able to do for our customers. We’ve harnessed open banking data to provide free personalized reports explaining exactly how price rises will affect them (at a personal level), then offer contextual advice on how to adapt to inflationary pressure and bridge the gap in their budgets. This means we’ve been able to take the cost-of-living crisis beyond the grim headlines and use data to help people identify their own personal inflation figures in pounds and pence along with the next steps to save time and money.

Tell us a customer success story of yours.

Scott Mowbray: The following are our customers’ success stories: 

Story 1

Snoop helped one customer clear £17,000 worth of debt in 11 months. After splitting with her partner, one of our customers turned to Snoop to get a clearer picture of her finances and understand the places where she was overspending. She had been using an Excel spreadsheet for years to note down what she owed and how much she was paying each month. That was a manual process and relied on up-to-date data and information, something that she didn’t always keep updated. Snoop flagged that she was paying high-interest rates on her credit cards and loans and suggested swapping them over to 0% deals. All unnecessary spending was put on hold and redirected towards paying off her debt. The customer also noted how Snoop reminded her to compare prices for her car, home, and pet insurance – something she told us she would have undoubtedly forgotten to do unless prompted. Now on her path to being completely debt-free, this story is illustrative of the power of using payment data to extract insight and nudges at exactly the right time to help people save time and money.

Story 2

An example to illustrate the power of the app: Snoop was able to pinpoint that some people in the Milton Keynes area might have been paying over the odds for their water bills. The app prompted users to check to see if they were paying for ‘surface water drainage’ – rainfall that falls on a property and drains away into public sewers. This charge is often added to bills even if it is not relevant, but it is up to the customer to find this out themselves and request a claim. Based on this insight, a customer successfully claimed £230 from Anglian Water. He shared the insight with his neighbors and soon realized the rest of his neighbors on his Housing Estate had been overcharged. After several more successful individual claims, Anglian Water initially agreed to look at a group claim for all 378 properties on the development. The result: Snoop helped one community get a £75,000 rebate.

When you consider the niche nature of this money-saving insight, you can see the vast potential of the business across mainstream bills and spending.

Your final thoughts?

Scott Mowbray: Our long-term plan is to build a significant business by doing good in the world. Before the pandemic, there was already huge demand amongst UK consumers to save and manage their money better. With the cost-of-living crisis deepening, this has never been more important. Based on our innovative approach and intelligently using data to make money bespoke and personal (not one-size-fits-all and transactional), we’ve been able to deliver millions of money-saving and money-management insights to customers and become an award-winning, revenue-generating business with significant growth momentum.

Your website?

https://snoop.app/


Kokou A.

Kokou Adzo, editor of TUBETORIAL, is passionate about business and tech. A Master's graduate in Communications and Political Science from Siena (Italy) and Rennes (France), he oversees editorial operations at Tubetorial.com.

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