CorePro—Social Money’s first API product—allows any company to offer FDIC-insured savings accounts.  

As Social Money approaches $5 billion in transactions, the company is celebrating another first: a product with an open API. Today the West Des Moines startup announced the launch of its latest product, CorePro, a core processing system that helps businesses and developers integrate savings accounts into online and mobile platforms. 

“We built this really amazing technology under SmartyPig and people have approached us wanting different aspects of that,” Social Money co-founder Michael Ferrari told Silicon Prairie News. “Most notably they’ve just wanted the ability to issue and manage these accounts in their own site.”

Ferrari describes the company’s third product, which was first announced last November, as taking the “innards of SmartyPig and wrapping them up into a API solution.” CorePro will allow everyone from pre-paid card users and merchants to other startups and developers to create FDIC-insured savings accounts for users across platforms.

“We refer to this as our next generation of core processing—a platform that literally allows any company, any developer to essentially build in savings account technology to whatever they’re building—and that’s pretty exciting,” Ferrari (right) said. 

So far, companies in the pre-paid card space have been extremely interested in the product, especially since cost has traditionally prevented savings accounts for pre-paid cardholders. While similar savings solutions have proven extremely costly, CorePro will cost little more than a penny a day per savings account—a fee Social Money says is about 25 percent the cost of other systems.  

“In the end, everyone wants to build a stronger relationship with their customers,” Ferrari said. “It’s one thing to have a transactional relationship where you use your card and spend, but saving is more intimate I think. It makes a much more well-rounded relationship for them with their customer-base.”

Last February Social Money released Goal Saver, a white-label version of SmartyPig—a goal-based online savings bank and the startup’s first product—that provides services for a number of financial institutions, including a bank in India where Social Money has a satellite office. CorePro is Social Money’s first product with an open API, an element Ferrari and the rest of the team are particularly excited about. 

“Having that product out in the wild I think is going to create a lot of opportunities for people like us when we first started,” he said. “If this product were available when we started SmartyPig, we probably would have used it.” However, Ferrari says there will be a slightly more stringent onboarding process due to the federally regulated nature of the accounts. 

The startup has already established a relationship with Iowa-based Lincoln Savings Bank and is in talks with a number of others. For roughly the next three months, CorePro will be in private beta.

Credits: Photos courtesy of Social Money.