Acorns Australia rebrands as Raiz Invest; Westpac and Assembly Payments team up
Acorns Australia is now Raiz Invest
Acorns Australia, a mobile app that uses small change to invest, has rebranded as Raiz Invest.
The move follows the announcement that Instreet Investment Limited, an Australian asset manager with $500 million under management, had taken a controlling stake in the local arm of the micro-investing app that started in the US in 2012. Previously, it had been a joint venture between Instreet and US-based Acorns Grow Inc.
The app can be set up to take one-off or recurring investments or use spare change, rounding up purchases and investing the difference. For example, if you spend $8.50 on lunch, Acorns will invest 50 cents.
From today, users will be prompted to update their Acorns Australia app, after which they will see the new Raiz Invest brand, logo and colour scheme. The website will also reflect the new name and branding.
“The change reflects our new autonomy and our ability to move quickly to develop and implement product improvements that are responsive to our customers in the Australian market. This resulted in our recent announcement of the introduction of a superannuation product,” says George Lucas, Raiz Invest managing director.
“Whilst our users will not notice any immediate difference to the way the app works, they will start to notice a product that becomes more tailored to their unique needs, with changes based on the feedback they share.”
More than 460,000 people have signed up to the app since launching Acorns Australia in 2016.
More rebrands and acquisitions
Another Australian fintech/paytech start-up, Assembly Payments, recently gained a new shareholder – Westpac.
Assembly Payments was launched as PromisePay in 2013. In 2016, it raised $16 million in its Series A funding round from Carsales, Rampersand and Reinventure (a venture capital fund backed by Westpac). Last year, the firm rebranded as Assembly Payments.
Now, together with its new stakeholder, Westpac, it has launched Presto, a payments solution for SMEs. Presto enables the sharing of transaction information between point of sale systems (POS) and merchant terminals. Staff will no longer need to re-key card transactions onto the payment terminal (i.e. manually input the sales amount).
The offering already has 45 POS providers on board.
Westpac and Assembly Payments say Presto can save a typical city cafe taking 1,200 orders a day three seconds in re-keying each card transaction, or up to an hour a day.
