Plum – The Key Points

Positives:

  • Plum use Open Banking, which ensures that although they are accessing your banking data, it is done in a safe, secure and regulated way.
  • All funds held in Plum savings or investing pockets are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme up to £85,000 per customer.
  • Plum allows the customer to choose the level of risk that they wish to take when investing.

Potential Concerns:

  • Funds held in the non-interest paying Plum pocket are not covered by the FSCS, so it is best for customers not to hold large amounts in this.
  • Plum offers investments in stocks, shares and ETFs. Any investment is risky and has the potential for the investor to lose all of their money, so any customer should be aware of this.

What Is Plum?

Plum is a multi-featured app that helps you not only to budget, but also to save and invest. The app connects to your bank account via open banking, then analyses your spending to calculate the amount you can comfortably save. This amount is then transferred automatically to Plum, and they then offer a variety of saving and investment options so that you can grow your saved funds.

Is Plum Safe – The Details

Regulation:

Plum is a UK company, and as such is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to provide payment services and as an investment provider.

Protection/Insurances:

Plum is not itself covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), and as such, if you hold funds in the Plum pocket, which is an e-money account, your funds would not be protected. However, Plum’s intention is that you move your funds to one of their saving or investment pockets. All of these pockets are held with Plum’s partners who provide the saving or investment, and these are all covered by the FSCS, so your funds are covered up to £85,000.

Credit Risks:

Part of Plum’s product range is to offer general investments, as well as investments as part of their ISA and pension offerings. Any investment carries risk, and any customer should be aware that their investment can go down as well as up, and they can even lose all of their investment.

Plum do offer the customer the option to choose the level of risk they want to have with their investments, and they ensure that investments made by the customers are diversified into various funds.

Company:

Plum is a relatively new startup, having launched in the UK in 2017. As such, Plum is not yet profitable. However, they appear to be well funded, with many large funds investing in the company. In addition, they claim to have over 1 million customers using the app, and are launching in several other European countries.

Data Security:

Plum use Open Banking to connect to your other bank and credit accounts, so that they can access the data so they can calculate how much you can afford to save, and if you wish, move the funds from your bank into Plum. Open Banking is a highly regulated and safe system. Plum would never have any logins for your banking, and would have read-only access to your data.

In regard to data, Plum state:

We use symmetric cryptography (AES) to store any sensitive data, state-of-the-art password algorithms and 256-bit TLS encryption to communicate between the browser and our servers.

Resources:

Trustpilot 

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/withplum.com

Is Plum Legit?

Plum are a properly regulated startup company that appear to be stable and on a path to profitability. They do offer investments, which always carry risk, but they are focused on less risky forms of investment.