Bync, a new startup launching today, will sync with your bank and credit cards in order to provide you with more relevant deals, offers and coupons which are sent out via email. You can think of it as the daily deals email that you actually want to read. The company began its life as Budgetable, a more comprehensive personal finance suite similar to Mint.com, but with offers. However, following user testing over the summer, the company found that it was the deals which really engaged customers.
The service currently works with 10,000 different credit card companies, banks and credit unions across the U.S. and Canada. To use Bync, users sign up and add credentials for their banks and credit cards, again similar to Mint, and it will then begin to sync their data to see which deals they would be interested in.
Bync CEO and founder Ryan Bales says he came up with the idea based on his own frustration with his daily deals emails - the offers just weren’t relevant to his tastes. “A lot of the daily deal sites are based on your location,” Bales explains, “but just because I live in Boulder, Colorado that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m interested in spas and the other things they offer. I starting thinking, it’s not a very good way to determine what people will like and what people will find useful.”
It would be better to target users based on actual spending behaviors, he realized. Of course, this is not an original idea. Banks and credit card companies are also competing this market, as well as other card-linked offers providers like Cartera Commerce, Edo, Placecast and others.
That being said, people love to get deals, so there’s still room for a new company to try its hand at the game. During Budgetable’s private beta involving 5,000 testers, the service saw very high click-through rates on deals emails, at around 12 to 15 percent. That’s around four times higher than the average daily deals email, Bales says, citing data from MailChimp’s extensive study.
Users can configure Bync to send them emails on either a daily or weekly basis, and currently, the offers will include a variety of online coupons, promo codes and other exclusive deals Bync itself has brokered with merchants. At launch, only around 10 percent of Bync’s deals are exclusive, as opposed to being aggregated by third parties, but Bales says this will change as more merchants come on board. He says the company is now in discussions with some bigger names, but isn’t permitted to reveal details of those potential pilot programs at this time.
The site will effectively operate as a middleman between merchants and customers, as Bync will only store anonymized spending data, not personally identifiable data. Part of Bync’s business model will be to charge merchants a fee to reach their loyal customers, but this aspect to Bync’s service has not yet gone live.
However, Bync will be monetizing at launch by offering a freemium subscription plan. Users can sync one card or bank account for free, but have to pay to sync more. For two accounts, it costs $3.99/month, four accounts is $5.99/month, and unlimited accounts cost $9.99/month. An annual subscription is less. A mobile application is in development, too.
Bync is a small, bootstrapped team of three based in Boulder. It’s in discussions with angel investors, but deals are not yet closed.
