Moves Financial. A banking platform designed specifically for gig workers

How Moves Financial uses Argyle to verify multiple income sources, unlock cash advances and direct deposit switches, and expand its product offerings

Moves Financial offers services built specifically for gig workers, accounting for income that typically spans multiple employers, platforms, and bank accounts. To understand users’ work patterns and earnings distribution, it needed an ongoing, real-time view into its users’ employment data—something only Argyle could provide.

Measurable successes

3x conversion

Transitioning to Argyle has increased Moves’ conversion rate threefold.

3x product offerings

In addition to its original gig economy cash advance app, Moves has built two new products that rely on Argyle’s data, including spending accounts and fractional stock rewards for gig workers.

The background

Inclusive services for a deserving community

In 2019, tech entrepreneur Matthew Spoke was looking for a way to provide help for gig workers, whose efforts to secure labor rights were then making headlines. He spoke with rideshare drivers, food delivery couriers, and in-store shoppers, among others, and learned that while they enjoy the flexibility and autonomy of their careers, they worry about pay instability and the lack of a financial safety net in the event of hardship.

The problem

Insufficient income transparency

To approve gig economy loans for cash advances and determine an eligible amount, Moves needed comprehensive insights into their income and work history. Initially, Moves relied on alternative API’s to connect users’ bank accounts, but that posed two challenges:

• With other data providers, Moves could only make indirect income inferences based on bank deposits they recognized as originating from a gig platform.

• The data transparency of the previous provider was limited to pay that had already been deposited, which can happen weeks after it’s earned.

Complicating matters was the fact that most of Moves’ users earn pay from multiple platforms. They may work as an Uber driver, DoorDash courier, and Amazon Flex contractor all in the course of a week, and Moves needed a way to know how much users were making from each source. That’s when the team at Moves had the idea to build a proprietary API to aggregate data from every app. They had just begun ideating a solution when they discovered Argyle. For Spoke, it was a game changer. 

“The moment we saw Argyle’s product, it was obvious it was going to spare us from having to build a solution ourselves. This is not our core competency, so it was a very easy decision from a cost-benefit perspective. We probably saved a year of work, because we were able to do an efficient turnkey launch with Argyle in a matter of weeks.”

Matt Spoke

CEO, Moves Financial

The solution

Holistic data to verify multiple income sources

Today, Moves deploys Argyle at the outset of the user journey. The empoyment and income data Argyle provides is Moves’ primary means of creating user profiles, pre-approving users for a cash advance, and predicting their future income to calculate repayment terms. The two-step process is seamless for all parties:

• First, Moves’ app prompts users to select an income source from Argyle’s vast database, which covers 75% of the U.S. workforce, including more than 95% of the gig economy.

• Once selected, users enter their credentials just like they would to log in to work.

From there, Argyle’s technology takes over, making the user-permissioned, real-time data connection Moves needs to confirm consistency of income. If users have more than one income source, they simply repeat steps one and two for each gig platform they do business with.“Argyle’s API immediately demonstrates to users that this product was custom-built for them,” said Spoke. “It deeply understands the way they work, the way they earn, the way they live. Our customers are unique and, thanks to Argyle, we can tailor our product experience as closely as possible to their patterns.”

Real results

Lower friction, higher conversion

Before Argyle, Moves was asking users to log in to their bank account through Plaid early in their journey, which precipitated a huge dropoff in engagement and a high percentage of incomplete profiles.“There's a comfort factor that crosses people's minds when it comes to their bank account,” Spoke explained. “Banking data is very sensitive, and most people are hesitant to enter those credentials.”By introducing Argyle at the beginning of the journey Moves has seen its conversion rate increase threefold. “Gig workers effectively log into their payroll system every single day,” said Spoke. “So asking them to do it to create a Moves profile was less of a behavioral change than requesting access to their bank account.”

Greater transparency, better decisioning

Once a user has connected all of their income sources through Argyle, Moves calculates their total earnings and weighs that amount against predetermined pay thresholds to arrive at their cash advance limit. It’s an assessment of how much they can afford to repay over a reasonable period of time.

“Argyle is our primary indicator for cash advances. We need to see a predictable income history to make confident cash advance decisions, and Argyle gives us a holistic, real-time view of gig workers’ earnings across apps. Argyle has played a big role in unlocking that value for our users.“

Matt Spoke

CEO, Moves Financial

In effect, Argyle enables Moves to make more educated gig economy loan decisions and advance the right amount to the right people, helping to prevent defaults and protecting users from oversized advances they can’t afford. 

Creative data solutions for new products

As Moves built its cash advance product, it needed to know where to send users’ funds and where to recover them during repayment. Data showed gig workers were often splitting earnings between multiple bank accounts—one for each platform it partnered with—making it difficult to reconcile their income each month and pay their bills.“Through Argyle, we had visibility into a user’s profile and could see how frequently they jumped between accounts,” said Spoke. “It became obvious that the next layer of problems to solve involved banking infrastructure to help workers manage all of their earnings and cash flow in one place.”Moves partnered with a bank to open flexible accounts for its users. The next challenge was making it easy for users to redirect its paychecks into a new account with Moves. That’s where Argyle’s direct deposit switching solution came in.“With Argyle, we enable direct deposit switching with a one-click feature within the app,” said Spoke. “It’s all automated, so users don’t have to go through multiple sources and manually transfer the information.”

The future

Leveraging the power of employment data

As Moves continues to evolve, it’s excited to expand services using Argyle’s data as a springboard.“We’re in the process of launching a first-of-its-kind feature that allows gig workers to earn fractional stock in the companies they work for,” said Spoke. “We want to make a shareholder out of every gig worker in America. Argyle plays a big role in unlocking those rewards. Using Argyle’s data, we can see if a worker earns 40% of their income through Uber and 60% through Lyft and then adjust their shares to reflect that.”As its business grows to provide additional services and a more interactive, social experience for its users, the team at Moves knows they can always count on Argyle for support.“I’m looking forward to a long relationship,” said Spoke. “We’re going to find many new use cases as the gig economy becomes a more common way of life, and Argyle will be a big part of that equation.”