My name is Sam, I’m a designer at Streeva, a startup with a mission to upgrade the way payments work. Our initial product called Swiftaid, is a service that makes it easier for donors and charities to add Gift Aid to contactless donations.
Gift Aid is a UK government tax relief that boosts donations by 25% at no extra cost to the donor. So providing you’re a UK taxpayer, you can add 25p to every £1 you donate.
Swiftaid removes the need to fill in Gift Aid forms with each donation, all you need to do is sign up once, connect your bank, and Gift Aid will be automatically added to your donations. The service will also provide end-of-year donation reports, making it easier for higher-rate taxpayers to claim tax back on donations.
We’ll be launching Swiftaid soon through Open Banking, but ultimately believe the best place for something like this, is inside banking apps, similar to the Monzo mock-up below.
What do you think? is this something Monzo should look to do? I’d love to hear your thoughts and any questions you have about Swiftaid!
Similar to Adam I am curious on the business model for SwiftAid / Streeva to ensure this would not take money from either the charity or the bank. Does sound like a good idea though.
We charge charities a 15% service fee on the Gift Aid we process for them. In return, we take care of the entire Gift Aid claiming process by generating declarations, claims, and all reports required by HMRC
So they take a percentage of the gift aid (15p per £4 donated if I understand right). Presumably, if someone isn’t eligible for gift aid, the processing of the donation is free?
Hey Adam, we’re working closely with charities to find a price that works for everybody. At the moment, we’re looking to charge charities 15% of the total amount of Gift Aid we process on their behalf.
There really is no need for this product. Any charity donation £20 or under including those made contactless cards can have gift aid claimed for under the small donations scheme. This means no forms to fill in for the giver and no need for the charity to record who gave the gift. And most of all no one to take a cut.
I’d say in general making it easier for people to give back to charities is a huge win. The exact mechanism behind that is unclear to me and I look forward to seeing what Monzo (and any sensible partnerships) can achieve in the next year or so.
I would say on the mockups you’ve posted specifically, I would have two considerations:
Transparency with the messaging. “boost your donation by 25%” insinuates that the charity gets 25% more, which as per the costing mentioned above is not true. “boost your donation by 10%”.
Besides the initial opt-in phase which is possibly being demonstrated here. Is the system completely autonomous from there on?
The Gift Aid small donations scheme (GASDS) is a great way for smaller charities to claim a Gift Aid top up each year, but currently, there’s only a £2000 limit.
Being transparent and open with pricing is definitely important to us. All the Gift Aid from HMRC goes straight to the charity so they get the full 25% – we charge a commission fee after they receive it. We could change our wording to “boost by 21.25%” but I wonder if that would introduce more confusion
Yep, the idea is to fully automate Gift Aid, so when you donate to charity, Gift Aid is added without you having to do anything
I’ll be the first to say I’m no wordsmith but I definitely think it can be clearer - though this might also just be the cast of the ‘Learn More’ interface much better explains it and the small prompt is kept simple. That could obviously be ironed out.
On a slight tangent it would also be interesting to see how the UI would look in such a scenario. We’re used to something like auto-round ups which has the total price as £5 but within the transaction it’s clear that £4.30 was the product and 70p went to your pot. In this instance you’d want to be clear only £4.30 was spent but X was given to to the charity. (Where X is arguably the amount they actually keep, as apposed to the amount they temporarily get)
On the transparency piece, I would say keeping it simple as you already have is clear enough (with a link to learn about your fee structure perhaps).
I would find “give 21.25% with gift aid” confusing, personally (as I know gift aid is a certain %, and I have a reasonable belief that things cost money to process).
If you look at Just Giving for example, I don’t find them to be particularly transparent about their fees, so without digging one would assume a greater percent goes to the charity than actually does in reality - something like 6.5% with the card processing fee is charged on the total donation.
I’d like this - at the moment it’s a complete pain for me to keep track of my gift aid donations for my tax return. Donations through JustGiving or Virgin Money Giving are easy enough, but museum admissions etc. I need to remember to log the donation amount.
How useful this is will depend on uptake by charities etc.
