Flourish Fi: Data-driven nudges for improved money management

With support from the Strive Community Innovation Fund, Flourish Fi will adapt its engagement and financial wellness platform to empower small businesses to better manage their finances. The Micro Entrepreneur Financial Journey Companion App will use nudges, games, and prizes to incentivize small businesses to adopt healthy financial habits. 

Flourish has already developed a SaaS financial wellness and engagement software to support healthy financial management for individuals, which has been successfully rolled out across Latin America in partnership with a number of banks. Their collaboration with Strive Community will enable Flourish Fi to design a similar solution for small businesses, drawing on its experience developing the consumer solution, its existing technical architecture, and its strong relationships with financial institutions. Flourish’s engagement solution hinges on three main components: 

1. Rewards and a behavioral engine designed to incentivize—through nudges and rewards—responsible financial management practices, such as saving or investing money, paying loans and bills on time, and adopting financial management apps or digital banking.

2. A personalized and intelligent rules engine that enables users to create their own rules for certain financial transactions (such as transferring $15 into a rainy day fund every time a sales target is hit).

3. A financial knowledge module, where real-time data and tailored insights are delivered and made engaging through a question-and-answer game. For example, Flourish’s Trivia Quiz questions businesses on what financial habits are best for their businesses based on their own financial records and past behavior. Rewards will be unlocked as business owners improve their quiz performance. 

These components will be modified and optimized specifically for entrepreneurs and small businesses by creating new logic around adaptive content and personalized missions that can generate improved resilience and profitability. Leveraging principles of design thinking, solutions will be closely co-designed with small businesses to ensure that scenarios and rewards deeply resonate with users. 

This will result in the development of a gamified journey that will allow businesses to progress through games, cues, and incentives to adopt healthier financial behaviors, which can in turn unlock rewards such as access to responsible credit. 

Flourish’s solution will be able to achieve high levels of personalization by leveraging Brazil’s newly available open banking environment. This will enable the company to analyze small business owners’ current personal and business financial habits and adapt behavior change objectives based on these.

The potential scale and impact of this initiative are particularly high because Flourish distributes its product as white labelled technology embedded within the products of financial institutions, credit unions, lenders, and fintechs. Based on Flourish’s experience with their consumer offering, it is anticipated that financial services providers will see great value in this solution for facilitating stickier relationships with their small business clients. Furthermore, the Flourish platform will provide financial institutions with data and insights about small businesses that can be used to underwrite them or better serve them with more relevant products. 

About Flourish Fi

Flourish Fi’s mission is to empower all people to build positive money habits and achieve financial security. In collaboration with top behavioral scientists and data experts, they are building the next generation of engagement tools to help underserved individuals and businesses build resilience and achieve financial freedom. They combine proven gaming mechanics and a nudging system that encourages people and small businesses to transact, build the habits of saving money, pay their bills on time, create credit history, adopt digital products, and spend smartly—all while learning healthy financial habits in their day-to-day money decisions.

Flourish has clients around the Americas, including Brazil, USA, and Bolivia. One of their flagship customers, Banco Solidario, is a renowned microfinance institution in Bolivia.